There are a lot of reasons why game workers need to organize, but it doesn't have to stop there. Tech workers in general can make the lives of their teammates a lot better by banding together.
We can also fight for the rights of others, why couldn't Amazon employees fight for the rights of Amazon's warehouse workers?
Also, things like discrimination and abuse are combated by organized workforces faster than they are by HR departments, especially when such abuse comes from managers. No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. It requires an organization of labor to do that.
> No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing.
Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing relative other employees, why would they have equal footing if every employee is inherently different from the next?
Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive. This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive). This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but if I feel like I am not, as an individual I have very little power. I can quit, but if I feel like most workers in my industry are not treated fairly, there's nowhere to go. However, if I organize with other workers, I have the bargaining power to make certain demands: suddenly employers realize if they want to employ people who have my skills, they have to meet certain reasonably requirements with regards to hours, compensation, etc.
Things like the 40 hour workweek aren't just a result of market forces. Market forces by themselves literally worked people to death - life expectancy in Liverpool during the industrial revolution was 15. It was through organization and struggle that workers achieved the rights they have today.
This is not only not true but incredibly disempowering. Every person under capitalism has to create value that others will pay for. It could be a traditional job, freelance work, a small business, a startup, being the stay-at-home domestic partner, performing, etc. Most people will choose a job because that's an easier path with well-defined benefits, but if you limit yourself to that, you're really boxing yourself in. What if you want to be a film director or a novelist? Those aren't even jobs you can apply for.
This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers.
You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some people.
See Coase's Theory of the Firm. Technology is changing the equation by removing transaction costs, and you see more freelancers and self-employed and Uber drivers.
I agree that the current framework makes freelancers and self-employed more vulnerable to cashflow problems, and it's an issue.
I've seen some interesting ways to mitigate it, even in my own country (with affordable health services for small business owners but they have salary caps that exclude IT workers)
It is economically viable for massively more people to do it. The main issue is a lack of simple economics and business education in US high school graduates. Without that, people have no idea how to go about starting their own small businesses.
There are lots of things that don't require dedicated employees that companies insist on.
For example, a public school shouldn't need to employ janitors, it should just contract with cleaning companies.
Unfortunately, the high school systems in the US give people no education on starting small businesses so people lack the economic and practical knowledge on doing so.
One of my relatives works for a large well known game developer; same employer for years. Because they decide to classify many of their devs as contract workers, they are denied rights afforded to 'full-time' employees - when she is laid off for months at a time (to prevent being called a full-time) she can't collect unemployment. No health care, no benefits whatsoever. And due to contracts, can't work for a rival either during this time. Its forced unemployment.
None of the employees are happy with this situation, but job scared that they'll simply be replaced by those who won't complain, and blacklisted.
I'm amazed that this is legal in a first world country- it would be illegal to do this in a couple of third-world countries I'm personally familiar with: the laws state that if you're a on contract for more than a certain number of months, you automatically become a permanent employee. Firing and rehiring for the same position as a contractor is straight-up illegal.
For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break.
The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions.
The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately.
Nobody needs to work 100 hours a week on salary for at a AAA studio who will discard you.
The key message is this:
AAA productions are losing touch with their audiences and spending unholy amounts of money on garbage games. (this is accelerating just like Hollywood).
Unlike the poor actor/actress who has to suck Spacey/Wienstein's dick, YOU have options. Go work a boring 9-5 webapp job with benefits and then hack on a game with a few passionate friends with a vision of something AWESOME.
The Internet levels the playing field for us. Minecraft is an excellent example of this.
> For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break
The game industry is not made up entirely of programmers! There are lots of other roles that do not map to the software industry such as animators, modelers and artists. They can't just switch to making enterprise CRUD apps. Even the programmers might have difficulty meeting the requirement of having 2-4 years experience on framework that got its first stable release in 2017.
"you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately"
If you are capable of learning how to use the apps necessary to be a animator/modeler you DO have the skills to work in another industry! Nobody is entitled to work whatever job they want wherever they want, and nobody forced you to take out loans to get a degree in Art/3d modelling or animation.
For example, I'd love to be a beer taste tester for 150k per year and live in downtown SF, but the demand isn't there. How would a Union of beer taster's improve the lot of people who want the job? They would establish rules to exclude up and comers with more talent who are willing to work for less.
The sad truth is a union will help people in the gaming industry just as much as a union would help the NBA. No matter what there will always be a shortage of jobs compared to the number of people who wish to work there. But the union will exclude a significant portion of people who are willing to work for less from competing at all.
Hint:(Similar to minimum wage, this is where unpaid internships came from)
So either you compete on price/working conditions, Or you end up with a Union cabal who set artificial standards of entry and keep out talented newcomers who are willing to work for less.
Majority of workers in game industry are artists, not programmers. And programmers are not the ones having "big breaks" or ability to influence what the game is going to be like.
There are almost always loopholes and gray areas. I'm pretty sure its illegal, but here is one example: I hire you to rebuild my kitchen; I eventually 'run out of money' and lay you off. 3 months later I rehire you to finish the kitchen. Are you really a full-time employee? Am I responsible for your healthcare? Or are you still just a contractor? In this example, i'll bet most would say no, you're just a contractor. But that is also just at your house, not some mega-corporation...gray area, right?
I believe its the use of layoff and such terminology, that gets them around laws
But if your contract with the "non-employee" says that they may not work for any employer for n years or that they may not use what they learned from working at your business elsewhere then I say they deserve compensation.
It is obvious to me that if you want an employee to not work for someone else, you need to pay them the same as if they're working for you. This is how things work at the executive level. This is how it should work for everyone. It is the least we can do.
Another example is the collapse of 38 Studios in Rhode Island - half their workers were brought in as contract workers; After 2 weeks without pay, the company finally collapsed: only 'full-time' workers were able to attend an emergency job fair the state created.
The rest of the employees, many who had moved to the area specifically for the job, couldn't even collect unemployment - I met one girl working at Uno's Pizzeria so she wouldn't become homeless and stuck in a distant state.
The game industry is not just coders, for one thing. Also worth noting this effort doesn’t preclude anyone from organizing a software developer’s union; in fact some people are working on that goal, and it’s also possible to join IWW as a software developer.
But to offer a different answer to “why just games” - this particular effort is newsworthy right now because it was organized to be promoted heavily at GDC, which I believe just ended.
Why not all employees? All humans? :) Sometimes subsets are usefully distinct and are better suited to certain purposes. In this case, it's because game workers are so poorly treated compared to the average worker of a similar tenure in other parts of the software industry.
Generally software engineers have a better pay(30-50%) and work-life balance than the game industry as a whole.
While the tech is similar the project cycles are usually quite different so I don't know if one-size-fits-all would get splintered by different concerns.
If the game industry is so rough, then why don’t workers quit and go work in non-game software or design? It’s because they CHOOSE to work on games and there are a lot of people that are willing to take lower pay and tougher conditions because they want to work in gaming.
The implication being made that game devs are some kind of sweatshop slaves is ridiculous.
The thing is they generally do quit, if you look at Gamasutra's yearly industry survey you'll see a huge bimodal distribution of less than 3 years and 10+ years. The average industry career ends up being about 3 years.
Here's a situation that I saw a lot when I was in the industry:
1. Get a new gig in a different town(usually because the previous studio cratered). Sell your house, move your family and get settled because this studio seems like it's being run sanely.
2. 4-6mo later crunch time hits. Mandated 80hr/week with 6-7 day work weeks. Anyone who takes even half a day off catches a ton of shit. Heck, I get yelled at for leaving the office at 11pm one day.
3. No funds(remember 30-50% less pay) or time to find a new gig and you've got a mortgage/rent/family to support.
4. Game fails/sucks because of crunch or other reasons. Studio closes/layoffs.
5. Repeat step #1.
I would hazard a good 80% of people in gamedev are paycheck-to-paycheck(I know we were). So while it's easy to just claim they should quit that's not as simple in practice.
They force people out who have 15+ years. (eg. It was age 37 for me). Thankfully they asked me to write documentation and train a bevy of testers to take my place before letting me go (once the eight race tracks for the game I was creating were completely designed).
The saddest thing (of this story)? This game, from a major mobile publisher, never even made it out of beta because their monetization component had no traction. As an aside, they also ended up scraping my tracks and replacing them with drone simple turn left/right then jump. Repeat. (because of the amount of work it was going to take to implement...)
That is one of too many stories. Truth is, nearly every/maybe all game development studios is poorly managed.
I wonder why that is. Would you say your company's founder started out with a passion for games or was it more corporate/started for profit?
I have wondered if the high failure rate is a mismatch of three key issues; passion and understanding for the medium in the company culture, management not knowing how to manage technical/artistic creators, and then the fickle nature of the target market.
Great games made by amazing developers can tank because they don't have the business chops. Management can't get a handle on what they are actually managing, because that has proven notoriously hard even when the software product isn't nearly as complicated as a game.
Even in ideal circumstances with a great team, game, and execution, your game can flop because it just wasn't flavor of the month or you released behind a more favored title.
I would love to hear what people think a great studio would look like.
I'd guess that unions aren't very effective unless a substantial percentage of the workforce joins, so it makes sense for an organization with limited resources to try to focus on getting wide adoption in a small, specific part of the tech industry rather than trying to get everyone to join all at once.
Maybe the game industry is the best place to start a tech union as a proof-of-concept, given that (if the stereotypes of game studios are true) it has a higher proportion of employees aren't too happy about their relationship with their employer than other parts of the tech industry where the pay and working conditions are better.
Games is a very seasonal industry with a lot of large studios exploiting this by putting ramping up before Christmas and laying off before bonuses in Q2. It also attracts a lot of young people that don't know their rights.
In NYC you expected to be at work at most companies for 9-10 hours a day, you are expected to go to all their social events, and you are expected to act like a logic lording startup bro (even when the company is far past the startup stage). Sure, they give you free treats, sure it's not hard to come by a job, but you are still ultimately expected to give up your autonomy to become a startup stooge.
Note that it is "game workers" not "game developers" - this seems to be more along the lines of an "industry union" rather than a "craft union" - so this will tend to devalue technological skill.
I would never join or pay into such a union. I'm so happy to be able to make employment agreements freely, and if anyone threatens that, I will criticize them. If developers in the game industry want to take crappy employment agreements because they're infatuated with video games, that is their right. The skillset is portable, and the instability of standard game dev positions is well known, game developers in general have ample opportunity to choose other software work, but opt for game dev work because they like the idea of it.
I think it's unwise (from my armchair) of game companies to build their business on a cycle of crushing the dreams of young people, but it's voluntary, obvious, and well-warned.
Many unions don't interfere with the ability of their members to enter into employment agreements freely. So with that new knowledge in your head, what's your next objection to such a union?
If you're going to criticize anyone who threatens your ability to make employment agreements freely, does that include corporations?
Apple, google, and other companies we're already found working in a cartel to keep software engineer wages down, and those were just the high profile explicit agreements.
I don't get people like you who find it ok for corporations to pool capital and output from all their employees in the negotiation process, but the second employees want to work together to even the playing field it's a deadly sin
The problem for me is that if other software developers decide to join together in a union then the government lets them negotiate on my behalf even though I do not consent.
I feel like that's the wrong view. The union is negotiating with the company and saying, work with only union employees or the union leaves en masse. Why would you have the right to just override the unions deal with the company?
It's discrimination to only hire people who will take below x$ an hour. You can make the argument that this is a bad type of discrimination and should be controlled, like discriminating against race/gender/age, but the fact that it's discrimination at all is not a strong argument
I see no problem with game workers unionizing, but when I want to release my indie game on itch or steam and I am stopped because I have to pay dues to the union, we'll have a very real and unfriendly discussion.
Many unions don't demand dues from other people just to work in the same industry.
A lot of people here (not you particularly; just that I might as well say it somewhere) have a very stereotyped view of what a union does, seeing it as some kind of compulsory enforcer that ties its members hands and goes around stopping outsiders working. I can't speak for everywhere, but my experience of unions in the UK is very different. Maybe this union could be modeled on that kind of approach. There's also the German Betriebsräte style which looks really interesting.
For an industry full of people that spout about disruption and how things are different and what new technology can do to empower people, there seems to be this picture of "unions" stuck inside people's heads that involves Jimmy Hoffa sending some thugs round to smash up your workshop because you sold product without going through the union, and large mafioso "encouraging" workers to join. At risk of massively generalising, that picture seems strongest inside the heads of our US colleagues; is the anti-union propaganda particularly effective there, or are the unions particularly stuck in that stereotypical Jimmy Hoffa style?
> All forms of closed shops in the UK are illegal following the introduction of the Employment Act 1990. They were further curtailed under section 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (c. 52)[7] passed by the Conservative government at the time. The Labour Party, then in opposition, had supported closed shops until December 1989, when it abandoned the policy in accordance with European legislation.[8] However, Labour shadow arts minister Thangam Debbonaire announced to an Equity conference in May 2016 that she favoured the introduction of a "limited" closed shop for actors, as part of Jeremy Corbyn's pledge to strengthen and introduce a new package of employment rights beneficial to employees.[9] Equity was one of the last trade unions in the United Kingdom to offer a pre-entry closed shop until the 1990 act.[9]
Indeed; that's certainly how it was, but now we can have something better. That's the old way, which I certainly agree had to go, although even that didn't stop someone else working in the same industry.
1990 is well before my experience, but soon enough I expect to be telling people how I was there for the crash of September 2000, before they were born.
Okey dokey. To my knowledge, in my country, no unions do. It's beyond their remit.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that today in the US a new union will not be able to make everyone stop writing game software. What do you think? Is that within their power?
Film unions don't regulate anything - 'indie' films can/do use union crews, although under a different contract that pays less according to budget.
Large budget films use unions because we are the only ones skilled enough to do it properly & professionally; you just can't find 200 non-union to pull it off, not without someone getting hurt in the process, or having a terrible end result
You can apply for the Low Budget Agreement on an indie film (defined as being under a particular budget amount I couldn't find), but it isn't required if you are in the guild. It was mainly created to protect individuals from larger studios - can't imagine much benefit from leveraging what are essentially personal projects.
IATSE Low Budget Theatrical Agreement sets a Tier-1 ("lowest"...their is a mythical tier-0, but its negotiated) for budgets under $6 million; Tier-2 is $6-10, and Tier-3 is $10-14
A Tier-1 has benefits such as $108/day toward healthcare, retirement. Pay rates in the range of $21-26/hr.
That said, i know of plenty of super-low budget indies that are just too small to use the contract -- the union often doesn't mind, and union workers will still do these 'passion projects' because they love the work
Nobody can force you to join a union. The scenario you describe only applies if Itch or Steam agree to only take game submissions from union members, which would just prompt non-union alternatives.
There's a case in front the US supreme court on this now.
Basically union dues are currently split between an administrative category and a political category (my terms, can't recall what they're actually called). Administrative covers the costs arising from actual contract negotiation and enforcement. Political covers anything dealing with lobbying or advertising etc (eg. vote Bill Murray because he supports unions).
Currently the political category fee does not have to be paid by non-union members (a free speech issue). The administrative category has to be paid by everyone covered by the contract whether union member or not.
The case in front of the court is to stop making the administrative portion mandatory... somehow because of free speech.
Personally I think it's a bit nutty. Someone that receives the benefits of collective bargaining but doesn't want to pay a cent towards the costs has got a screw lose.
If the SC decides the admin fees are not mandatory then unions are going to have a tough time. If enough idiots opt out of membership the union will not be able to afford a solid contract negotiating team or even an enforcement team. This will let companies strike contracts that are much more in their favor. And presumably the employee's will blame the union and more will opt out... until the union is no longer financially viable.
Let alone what it will do to union's lobbying and political efforts.
I see where you’re coming from with the “screw loose” comment, but think you skip past a very real desire for self governance:
A “startup” that drone-feeds pigeons in the park could make the case that I enjoy the benefits of well-fed pigeons, and that I should be prepared to pay.
As great as pigeons are, I might feel diminished by the startup’s posture, which betrays low esteem for my ability to allocate my resources.
Governance fits into the space where people don't want to self-manage. The average neighborhood doesn't want to bother spending the time or effort to vet possible service providers, let alone a pigeon feeder. They're paying dues precisely for the privilege of letting other people decide.
They don't always agree, but that's what the monthly meetings are for. Eventually everyone agrees on the scope of governance.
OK, I think an example is in order. Let's say you want to not live in a neighborhood with a bunch of weirdo dicks. The kinds of weirdo dicks that will paint their house bright neon purple and erect a large statue of a dick in the front yard.
But you don't want to do the actual work of coming up with a set of rules for everyone to live by. For the very good reason that that crap is hard and thankless and nobody's going to agree with every rule.
So you empower a homeowner's association to do it for you. This is a form of governance empowered to set rules that the neighborhood has to follow. Residents just have to pay the dues in order to ensure that their wishes are followed.
Self-management in this case is calling the cops and hoping they can sort your neighbor out.
You call it governance when you have to impose rules on others. It's annoying and ugly but someone's gotta do the job of exercising the will of the many onto the few that don't feel like they should follow the rules.
If you don't want to live under an HOA, you don't buy into a community that has one.
> If the SC decides the admin fees are not mandatory then unions are going to have a tough time. If enough idiots opt out of membership the union will not be able to afford a solid contract negotiating team or even an enforcement team. This will let companies strike contracts that are much more in their favor. And presumably the employee's will blame the union and more will opt out... until the union is no longer financially viable.
Right-to-work legislation in a nutshell, and it worked.
Its called 'right to work' and its a disgusting anti-union effort, where a worker will not pay dues, but be afforded all the protections and benefits the union gets it's members. And then assume they deserve those benefits without contributing to the organization that does the actual fighting.
It was found recently that right-to-work states have a far higher worker injury & death rate than non-RTW, and lower wages. Its a race to the bottom.
It's not surprising, as right-to-work legislation was intended to be a "starve the beast" method of union busting. Can't make unions illegal without an uproar (probably unconstitutional to do so as well, right of free association), but you can deprive them of funding by removing mandatory membership from employee contracts.
As someone who went to school for game design but hasn't actually been blessed yet with getting a job in games, this seems like an interesting idea. I know from my personal experience at the software companies I have worked that the culture is what drove the work to personal life ratio. My first job out of school was a start up and when the product the team I was a part of was nearing it's set-in-stone deadline, for about 3 months I was working 6 days a week and about 12ish hours a day. We weren't a game studio but we still had a taste of that crunch time that the game industry is infamous for.
A union will solve nothing other than leeching off some money from the workers (yay!). If you want to solve the problem you have to educate the credible little children who think working in gamedev is a privilege and are willing to work for free because "games!". Currently and for decades there has been an infinite supply of these, hence all the junior and mid roles pay less than half than any other industry.
To claim that unions "will solve nothing" is to deny the long and well-documented history of their success.
The end of collective bargaining is the end of the free market.
It's very easy to understand the negative realities of unions, but nobody starts a union for fun. It's risky business. Industries are classically given plenty of chances to adjust. Sometimes they even do. That's why it's called bargaining. Small businesses, products, brands, they all work on this same principle. Go complain to Consumer Reports!
You have explained why the game industry is able to take advantage of people, but nobody asked. It's well obvious. The question is whether you find the behavior acceptable. I cannot relate to punishing people for wanting a career in an $18.4 Billion industry. Maybe it is a privilege. Some would call it the American dream. Many colleges promote these degrees. Maybe that is where you should direct your anger, because the result of corporations exploiting labor is no mystery to history.
It's still concentrated in big studios, big titles are requiring a massive amount of labour and experience. It's difficult to recreate that from nowhere.
You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own pocket than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical and non-technical co-workers. Apparently, he only believes that innovation is possible everywhere else besides unions and collective bargaining. Be positive my friend, I’m sure we’re capable of creating a new type of union in 2018.
> You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own pocket than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical and non-technical co-workers.
As someone who eats, sleeps and breathes automation projects you (probably) won't find somebody more worried about the human costs of automation than me. 90% of our job as an internal development team is to reduce labor costs by automating various tasks, and while we continue to grow staffing because we have continued to grow our list of contracted facilities there will be a day (even if it's a decade or more away) that REDUCTION in workforce is a possibility - I fear that day, and I can only hope by that time our civilization is prepared for it.
> Be positive my friend, I’m sure we’re capable of creating a new type of union in 2018.
We've always been capable, unions people complain about are almost always a direct result of poor participation by members - if you want things to change make your voice heard and vote on union issues, it's no different from politics in that fashion.
I see a lot of people arguing about how unions protect workers, and in some cases that is true, but in my experience many have been corrupted. You only have to look at the coal workers, steel workers, and several other unions, that's leadership has been corrupted, and serve their own interest at the expense of everyone else.
Additionally, things like agency fees, where even if you work somewhere with a Union, and you are denied membership, and member only benifits you can still be required to pay the union, for their "collective bargaining benifits."
There are also the nightmares of union fiefdom, if a light bulb burns out in your office and you want it changed, you can wait till a union employee comes to do it, or you can pay the union the minimum call out fee (usually a couple of hours) after doing it yourself.
Unions have completely failed at protecting retirement plans, and preventing age discrimination across the country.
I can't understand how anyone can honestly evaluate the performance of unions in the last several decades and think that implementing one would in anyway make for a better work life situation.
Half of what you just said is neoliberal anti-union propaganda. A lot of people in blue collar unions get a ton of value from them. Teamsters and Boilermakers have rights protected by their unions. Yea unions have lost battles or become corrupted, but they're leaders are also elected. What you think your CEO is going to be any better?
Then there are also unions for more middle to higher class groups. Writers unions, actors, professional athletes, teachers.
Ideally, Unions exist to do that, but like many institutions, overtime they drift and are distorted away from their purpose, and mainly serve to preserve their own institution.
I can't speak to how unions are all over the country, and I can't deny that unions have played a positive role in the day to day lives of workers.
But what I've personally seen working in heavy industry, both the stevedoring and the steel industry. Is that unions serve themselves first, and their members secondly, and if those places that have union security agreements.
The unions force non-members to basically make their lives hell.
At the same time, the union agreed to a salary freeze for all its members for a 3 year period. It doesn't matter if you are the best at what you doing in the world, we couldn't compensate you more to retain that employee if we wanted it.
Ask anyone who works in the Port of Los Angeles about the unions, they have locked out all technologies from automation or even telemetry unless those companies sign contracts with union vendors, etc.. etc..
My opinion isn't based on theory, or propaganda, It's from seeing everyday. Which, I highly doubt most of the people condemning my viewpoint can say.
Nice propaganda, dude. We all 'hear' stories like this, but in reality, if you have any experience with people who are actually in unions, its nothing but good. And unions are the only ones pushing back against government cuts to things like education and medicaid.
Yeah but the United Mine Workers Association (a coal union) got us the eight hour workday - before that, they just exploited the shit out of you.
"Back when the government first tracked workers' hours in 1890, full-time manufacturing employees worked a backbreaking 100 hours each week. Years of pressure from laborer organizers, along with changes from companies like Ford Motor, reformed working conditions in the U.S. and protected workers from schedules that endangered their health and safety."
People are forgetting how life was when the capitalists got their way without any legal worker protections. Read about the conditions in british coal mines or in carnegie's steel mills. We should not go back to these days and unions are an important part of preventing that.
They don't publish the names of their members and they don't have a tiered structure of who does what. Everyone presumably reports to a small group of leaders.
I have read the whole website and failed to see one concrete example of action that the union could take to make game-industry employees' life better
Game Workers Unite is a broad-reaching organization
that seeks to connect pro-union activists,
exploited workers, and allies across borders
and across ideologies in the name of
building a unionized game industry.
Even compatible with the libertarian ideology :p ?
Libertarians usually say that everyone should be free to form contracts without government restriction. Why shouldn't unions get the same freedom to form binding contracts that everyone else gets?
Forming a union is no big deal, but if others don't have the right not to negotiate with or support that union by virtue of the type of work they're doing, it may as well be a government restriction on your right to pursue employment.
Why should you have a right to work at a particular place?
The workers with a democratic process negotiated with the management. You’re not special. Why should your unwillingness to participate impact the rights of others who freely entered into an agreement?
> Why should you have a right to work at a particular place?
Well, that's not what I said though. I said a right to pursue employment. That is, to be free to negotiate for an agreement with no forcible terms, to exchange something you have for something you want more than what you're exchanging.
You have that. You can take a job in a union shop and you’re able to pursue negotiations as part of the democratic process in the union. My colleague in a former job is in the middle of that right now, running for union office. Or you can go somewhere else.
Whatever you’re negotiating yourself, 9/10 times you’re still an at will employee and really have no bargaining power. Individual negotiations for jobs are like buying a car — every dude is telling you how they beat the dealer. I’ve hired many many software people over the years and almost never leave a fairly narrow salary band — maybe 5% of cases. Offering a few percent over average is usually enough.
Why would I want my salary to be the same as everyone else? If I am better than the next person and I am a better negotiator, why should my salary be identical to the lazy fuck that has the same number of years of experience?
The mistake of these Marxist organizations is that they assume that workers are interchangeable parts. Maybe on an assembly line that is true, but engineering software or hardware or designing things? You can train someone to install a windshield in a Ford plant. You can’t really train someone in problem solving or creativity.
I am an individual; I am not a member of a “collective.”
Union contracts can set minimums, but you can negotiate higher. And in the end, if you suck, nobody will hire you. If you don't suck, you'll make atleast a great wage, if not higher. Not all unions have seniority rules; my union naturally filters out the crap people.
You are arguing that you should get more than the other guy, when in reality a decent contract can guarantee you both more than you alone might have earned.
Hypothetical: if you could increase your salary from what it is, but your coworker who makes less would also get that new higher salary, would you go for it? Even if you think you're better than they are?
To put some numbers on it: you're at $100k and Alice is at $90k (because she's a woman?). After unionizing, you'd get $110 and Alice would get $110.
1. Evidence of women being underpaid (in tech)? Definitely got evidence, both anecdotal and US-wide.
2. You didn't answer my hypothetical, but I'll answer yours: If my salary doesn't change but Alice gets a raise, good for her, doesn't bother me. If I never got hired I don't care about Alice's salary, likewise if she never got hired. Anyway, the parent comment complained "why would I want my salary to be the same as everyone else?" so that's what my hypothetical gets at.
> Why would I want my salary to be the same as everyone else? If I am better than the next person and I am a better negotiator, why should my salary be identical to the lazy fuck that has the same number of years of experience?
Why do you have disdain for other workers, who largely share your economic and political interests?
I've been working in game development as a software engineer for going on seven years and am happy to see this initiative. Unions nothwithstanding there is plenty of variation in the working conditions throughout the industry. The best empirical reflection of that is the annual IGDA surveys: https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/2017_....
If you find yourself at a studio with poor working conditions, know that there are plenty of studios that better respect you and your time. Hopefully unionization, or at least the threat of it, will raise the floor on the conditions and compensation for the employees most often exploited: contractors generally and QA specifically.
Workers in the game industry are not only devs. There are also artists, testers, IT techs, marketers. I'm not sure the biggest issue is about the salary, but the (unpaid) overtime, precarity, sudden lay-offs, etc.
Okay, let's call it compensation. That is a good umbrella term that includes salary, overtime and benefits.
The compensation for game workers sucks compared to their counterparts in other software fields. This is probably because it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.
It is a good idea for game industry workers to form a union or guild.
How about the game industry workers unsatisfied with their compensation come work for companies like SFDC? Everyone is hiring. Even if your passion is for games, there are still many benefits to the path of taking enterprise roles, not least among them is to build up a financial nest egg to fund your own game or to let yourself accept the lower compensation in order to fulfill a child wish to work on the next Halo with hundreds of others.
When the industry is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor, some type of a union apparatus is the most affective way to ensure fair compensation.
Yes, we can educate others who want to enter the industry, but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt, you'll accept the poor working conditions for long enough and the cycle will continue to perpetuate.
The best protection against predation is for the prey to act together. Predators will always divide and conquer and go after the weak, and so the weak must be protected. The other way is increased competition - but our environment is becoming more and more anti-competitive.
is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor
You need to think about WHY this situation happens. I'm willing to believe grouped negotiations can bring value to a class of workers but it's a partial remedy to a bad situation.
but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt
Paying expensive university could be a really bad decision, especially in markets like game industry / software dev, which doesn't require by law that you pass some exams. Funnily, once you create huge syndicates / unions for the game industry or software dev, maybe you'll see these kind of "protection" to emerge
That's a good point about unions requiring minimum education levels for membership. I suppose this is where apprenticeships come in. There will still be non-union developers, just as there are non union plumbers.
Ok, I can accept that. I can even accept that some people think game dev is sexy. And I'm willing to say that it's all on me for not understanding, but I just don't understand how game dev (especially if you read about how it really happens) is more sexy or glamorous than Salesforce dev?
My only guess is that gamers think games are way sexier than the way Salseforcers think about Salesforcing, and so maybe game devs get a little more hero status than Salesforce devs? Something like that?
Do most actual game developers think, "whoa, this work I'm doing is so sexy"? I don't know that they don't. I've just never heard it.
I'm sorry to all the sexy game devs I've slighted by these opinions. It is not at all my intention. Keep on with your sexiness.
I see a lot of comments talking about employees butting heads with managers and somehow a union will protect them. I don't really see what role a union has in that particular case.
I just want those poor bastards in QA to get overtime or full time benefits.
Consider some of the negative affects of unions when working alongside low and high performers in technology:
- Protection for under performers alongside high performers. Difficult or darn near impossible to terminate employment. Ability to enforce performance evaluation and plans could be killed by the union. Common in teacher unions.
- Without being able to measure performance, pay may be solely based on tenure, not skill.
I have been working in the tech industry for 5+ years now (not too long, I know). I have yet to see a company that commonly identifies low performers and successfully terminates their employment for performance reasons only.
In fact, the three times I have seen companies terminate employment after somebody was put on a PIP it was directly related to other mental health issues the employee was going through at the time. Anecdotal m, obviously, but this complaint about unions smells bogus to me, since a common complaint about the tech industry is about blood sucking low performers that stick around long past they’re due.
As for measuring performance I again fail to see any company that does an adequate job of this with heuristics that aren’t at least partially, and usually fully, based on tenure.
In short, what makes you think we’re good at these things now, such that unionizing would make them worse.
I have seen people fired for incompetence. In fact, I appreciate companies where that happens at least every now and then. I've left jobs where incompetence wasn't corrected in some way.
Though generally what happens is employees get basically cost-of-living raises indefinitely. Over a decade or two, the company ends up with a half-price employee, compared to market rates.
Also we don't have to be good at evaluating employees to get worse at it. Giving raises on certification and seniority will make engineers chase promotions and titles instead of solving problems and finding managers that appreciate the work.
As far as I can tell everything you're describing is the primary way that people are currently promoted and how compensation is decided. The real unicorns aren't companies with billion dollar valuations, but companies where you can just focus on solving problems and have your manager recognize that with compensation and promotion.
Just like unicorns... they don't exist.
I still feel like my question stands. Are we actually so good at these things now that unionizing would actually harm us? Or is this claim that unions will make it harder actually just hand-waving and ignoring the fact that we're already terrible at this kind of evaluation only we (workers) have no recourse against a feelingless corporate structure that exists to min-max productivity and compensation for the benefit of shareholder value?
Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.
If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to adapt, and not the other way around.
General consensus amongst the developers that work directly with the person being investigated. It's pretty easy. Head butting with poor managers and broken company structures with ZERO recourse is the problem. The strawman you're putting up is not.
Email archives of PIP goals and the like. But that doesn't even matter. All you really have to do is prove you didn't fire them because they asked for OT pay they were owed.
You could use the exactly these arguments for union and against. But in modern justice systems you are innocent until proven guilty, simply so anyone cannot just scream witch and have someone burned.
Getting laid off isn't getting buried, though. Getting a crappy raise isn't going to jail.
I do think employees need organization and culture to negotiate better in the short term and manage health and career in the long term. But I don't see evidence that either the employer or the union leadership have the right incentives to meet those needs.
I agree, but the consequence of getting fired for a employee is worse than the consequence for a employer not being able to fire someone. Also a company is more often a organization of several people which can be used to leverage a firing (or what you call it). A union only seeks to counter this by giving each employee a more level playingfield. Without unions and worker laws it is basically a third world country where anyone is at risk of being fired for reasons they dont understand or was never informed of and never given a chance to improve. The importance is in the power balance. It could even be argued that unions are just as important for distributing power and wealth in a society as a democracy. The scandinavian model is by some attributed to the power of the worker unions. Of course anyone working in management and business osners will always oppose unions. But it makes no sense that workers themselves opposes it. Skilled workers will still get work and get better compensated for it.
I don't think the grandparent's point is an issue of sides. It's more of a problem of gathering a useful heuristic of an engineer's performance. Given a variety of every day engineering tasks, how can you know exactly the difficultly of a person's work short of having done it yourself? I believe that experience is the answer in some cases, but others it is not. As another poster stated, it could also be done by working with the engineer through it all.
That's basically my take. A lot of evaluation is properly subjective and qualitative. Both bosses staring at deadlines and union negotiators clamoring for paper trails and predefined metrics are going to be bad for the industry and therefore workers, at least in the long run.
Of course it's just FUD. Millions of dollars are spent every year to stop people from organizing and to break up existing unions. Finally someone is trying to help tech workers organize, expect more of this.
Unions are like lawyers members get representation irrespective of guilt or innocence.
Yes a Union cant stop some one being fired if they are guilty of Gross misconduct but they can make sure people don't get fired for say accusing a manger for unwanted touching or to make wahy for the CEO's nephew.
For example I bet James Danmore had no advice before his internal hearings that lead to his firing.
Filmmaking, especially in Hollywood, has a long tradition of strong unions. As all your statements are invalid in terms of Hollywood, I don't see why they should be valid for the game industry.
I think the way film making unions are organized is something to look into but my impression is that the problem space is more familiar when you look at what industrial worker unions deal with. That is: careers under a single employer instead of gigs where you go from employer to employer and have to basically get re-hired.
The difference is that a lot of roles in film are individual. You can hire a director, a writer, a scenarist, a bunch of actors etc. separately and they will do their job just fine. And for the tasks, which require high-skill teamwork, movies contract a company, which employs the team full-time (e.g. VFX, stunts).
There are very few individual roles in games. Even leadership roles are highly dependant on their teams (just look at what happened to Visceral if you want an example). And there is a lot of interdisciplinary interaction too, so even if there were separate game programming, game design and game art houses, there is no guarantee their could work with each other in a productive manner. At best you can separate QA and some art teams, which already happens all the time.
that's true. I think something really unique in game dev is that parts of the team can fluctuate while another part has a larger commitment across several projects.
EDIT: I'll also add, although obvious to some but worth mentioning, that an effective game-dev union needs to help both those people equally.
I think its important to point out that there are a wide range of union constitutions & contracts - not all film jobs are gigs; there are contracts that cover workers who work for a single employer, like a tv studio, film projectionists, or arena stagehands (all IATSE)
That's only if you are speaking of protection without procedure to allow the employee to improve or checking to see if there is a medical reason (including mental health issues). Otherwise, no. This simply isn't true. You can still let employees go because they aren't actually doing their job, just like you can still let employees go for bad attendance, among other things. Unsurprisingly, the call center I worked at had high turnover (both employees quitting and getting fired) before and after it became unionized. But it does make it harder for employers to use these excuses willy-nilly.
"Could be killed by a union".. yes, or they could be killed by corporate policy or management that lets rules slide for employees they like.
Your example of teachers unions is a bad one, as they often get villified. Yet, we know there are multiple reasons for a so-called "underperforming" teacher, multiple solutions that help, and the fact that one has to be able to replace the teacher if you let them go, all complicating the issue.
"Pay may be solely based on tenture, not skill"
Note your use of "may be". Tenure-only pay is often used for jobs that you can't measure the skill of one person against another: Factory jobs, for example. These often still have a pay range, giving more for folks with education than those without, for example. What changes is generally transparency: Skill measures and the evaluation of those skills needs to be communicated to employees in ways they can meet and/or improve them. In addition, these same issues happen outside of unions as well.
Unions are reactionary organizations. They tend to create and enforce rules around how things work now. Unions don't like it if new technology lets two workers do the work of forty.
All organizations are reactionary and necessarily settle on the state of the world at the current moment. This is an extremely bizarre line of logic you are using.
There is always version lock in at some point, and NO workers like change if it's going to cause them to lose their livelihood. This has nothing to do with unions.
Why do you care more about protecting artificial constructs like companies at the expense of power given to people building the products?
I honestly don't care about companies. But I don't care about union bosses either. Unions do just as poor a job as employers in preparing workers for tectonic shifts in employment patterns.
For example, when the ACA passed, unions were more concerned with their constituency and their carve outs than with decoupling employment from healthcare. Same story for all the business interests.
A company is comprised of many parts — including its employees. Calling it an artificial construct may be legally and semantically valid, but it’s also dismissive to the reality that any company is more than just the ink on its articles of incorporation (or whatever).
The argument is much more nuanced than you’ve proposed.
I don't think it is about technology. In general, unions don't like people to get fired (without proper compensation). If new tech does more work for the company but no one gets fired I see no reason why unions would have anything against it.
However, the whole firing topic is really only filling up a fraction of unions' time. Unions' main tasks are overwatching safety regulations, crunch times, etc... so that the actual time spent at/for the company is better quality whise. This leads to happier, healthier programmers which should be in their employer's interest as well, see e.g. negative press and lack of battle proven personel at telltale.
Ok. We have automated the build process. We don’t need you anymore. Thanks for your service, here’s two weeks’ severance.
A union would go nuts in that scenario. Which then supports the theory that unions would oppose technology that improved efficiency since they would care more about the protecting the production input than they care about optimizing the production output.
Yeah because that's really shitty. If you actually cared about that person you wouldn't throw them out, you'd train and place them elsewhere within your company because they are good employees that contribute positively to your culture.
Unions are just as responsible for being myopic and irresponsible. Shouldn't the teamsters be leading the way in retraining truck drivers given the coming automated truck apocalypse?
There are plenty of trainings offered by unions. However of course, each union offers the courses it has expertise in. Asking a trucker's union to offer courses in Javascript is not feasible.
As you can see unions are in fact discussing this very broadly without jumping to easy conclusions.
Automation by ML is a complex topic on all levels. We are just at the beginning of what will be very interesting times regarding policing automation, ML, and AI.
Its up to the union to determine rules like seniority. My union has no seniority - if you suck, you don't get hired. if you break a major job rule, you'll get fired.
Union bonus is, that when your a-hole boss has a grudge and fires you for a bogus reason, you can dispute it, and possibly get your job back too.
Our contracts also spell out specific job titles and positions, and pay rates accordingly - a guy who only sweeps gets $x, where as a special effects technician gets nearly 3 times that amount.
Those are risks to both employers and employees. The idea is that employees accept measures employers want ( layoffs, performance evaluations) in return for security (full time contract that gives unemployment benefits, medical etc).
I think partly this has to do with "the struggle" factor.
Once, I had this guy who owns a big gaming company and I asked him the same question, why do you treat these employees, unlike other software companies?
He said, there was a time when he no one would apply for open job listings at his company because they had less money or they were not very hot.
And that he understands, he can push the people around as he has earned it. So, it seems there is some revenge and ability to justify worse at work here.
What can you do? There aren't that many successful companies and the even if there are, they aren't growing as fast as your SV startup, so they do not need increasing supply of labor.
I've seen first hand how terrible dev environments such as EA are compared to startups and tech giants in SV. But that said.. in an industry where the barrier of entry for new games companies is so low, why is this even necessary? Any group of disgruntled employees with some ideas for games can say enough is enough and go start their own games company where they treat people better and subsequently attract talent (whilst raising the bar for everyone else).
The idea that it’s simple to build, design, audio engineer, graphic design, run a company, market the product, do accounting/taxes, figure out your legal stuff, etc is patently absurd
"Have you ever felt exploited by the game industry? Are you in a precarious situation? No job stability and in desperate need of support? Are you losing hope that you can work in a landscape you love at all?" I'm not sure that your point actually is relevant to what they're hoping to address. Everyone having the opportunity (nevermind the intent or will) to start their own game company does not address exploitation in any way.
Companies are typically careful to keep employees atomized enough to prevent the disgruntled from organizing. Typically they suffer in isolation and just job hop until they find a place they enjoy working at.
There are also small things companies can do to make the lives of their employees better that are sometimes impossible to negotiate as an individual. Unified teams can negotiate some of these things.
There are a lot of reasons why game workers need to organize, but it doesn't have to stop there. Tech workers in general can make the lives of their teammates a lot better by banding together.
We can also fight for the rights of others, why couldn't Amazon employees fight for the rights of Amazon's warehouse workers?
Also, things like discrimination and abuse are combated by organized workforces faster than they are by HR departments, especially when such abuse comes from managers. No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. It requires an organization of labor to do that.