Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.
You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.
> somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery"
I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes, because my entire point is that the outcome doesn't matter: at some threshold value and below, the existence of the org itself is immoral. We don't have to agree on where that point is, but its existence shouldn't be up for debate, IMO.
I hope we can all agree that a slave plantation should not exist in 2025, regardless of whether it's making billions in quarterly profit, or hovering above insolvency. Paying workers at this plantation $0.01 per hour isn't okay, either, but if you keep adding $0.01/hr N times (and incrementally improve working conditions), you'll eventually arrive at the threshold I was describing.
Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management?
There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
Not all of those were instances of the management purposely screwing people, but let's suppose some of them were. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?
Not all businesses fail because of unions, but let's suppose some of them did. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?
It goes both ways. There are plenty of nations with strong unions throughout. In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
The fact that someone can pull up an example where a union caused a business to go under doesn't make me think "we should eliminate unions". It doesn't even make me think "We should limit union negotiation powers" primarily because unions rights have been curtailed since the Reagan era.
If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
That's the point. We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it, instead of saying "what about those other guys" to justify the bad behavior of either of them.
> In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
You're referring to some of the least efficient industries in the US with high levels of regulatory capture. The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship" (i.e. permission from an incumbent), is one of the big reasons construction costs so much, people can't afford housing and government construction projects consistently blow the budget.
> If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
Most "worker protections" are nothing better than highly inefficient alternatives to unemployment insurance. If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure. If you don't have competitive markets then you're unconditionally screwed and the first thing you need is to fix that.
> We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it, instead of saying "what about those other guys" to justify the bad behavior of either of them.
Im not justifying anyone, I'm suggesting a pragmatic, imperfect solution to a clear power imbalance. There's only one way to treat a counterpart who repeatedly defects on the iterated prisoners dilemma, and its not waiting for them to unilaterally start cooperating.
> There's only one way to treat a counterpart who repeatedly defects on the iterated prisoners dilemma, and its not waiting for them to unilaterally start cooperating.
Except that there isn't only one way, there are two. The first is that you keep playing with the defector and start defecting yourself, hoping that they unilaterally start cooperating. The second is that you quit playing with the defector and go play with someone else. And which one of those is likely to work out better for you?
> We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it
I'll agree to that. But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment. The place where change needs to happen is in management. But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.
> You're referring to some of the least efficient
Least efficient how? Because it's expensive?
> high levels of regulatory capture.
No. Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market. The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no". There's a billion different companies in any given city that do trade work.
> The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship"
For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high. There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).
> If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure.
That's wishful thinking assuming that a competitive market can't also be exclusive, hard to enter, or oversaturated. There are things that naturally can't be competitive, usually involving high levels of skill or knowledge. For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.
> But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment.
It's possible that those two sentences are related.
> But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.
So to some extent the premise needs to be challenged. If e.g. Kmart fails, but there are a zillion others to take its place for workers and customers, then its failure is primarily of impact to its shareholders and it's their fault for hiring shortsighted fools to run it. The people who used to work there can just work somewhere else.
If e.g. GE fails, and it was the primary company sustaining some industry in the US, that doesn't work because now nobody is doing that here anymore. But the problem then isn't that they failed, it's that they didn't have enough domestic competitors to begin with. Mismanaged companies are supposed to fail, what they're not supposed to do is take the domestic industry with them.
> Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market.
That's literally the same thing. "New employees" and "competitors" are synonyms.
> The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no".
So zoning rules can't be regulatory capture for the housing market, even if they're unambiguously limiting supply and raising costs, because there is no oligopoly?
> For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high.
It works for truck drivers and lawyers and real estate brokers etc.
Meanwhile the assumption is that the apprenticeship requirement would have higher standards, but it doesn't. It's even less effective. All it is in most places is a time requirement. If your overseer has you doing nothing but wrote physical labor of a uniform type that only represents 1% of what you would see if you went out on your own, you've still put in your hours and get your license. And it's far more susceptible to corruption because then people sign off on hours not actually performed in cases of nepotism etc.
> There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).
That's just another example of trade organizations capturing the regulators. The fact that they use the AMA instead of a union doesn't change the nature of it.
> For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.
Sure it can. Prohibit vertical integration. Make all the fabs contract fabs (most of the state of the art ones already are) and then separate the facilities from the production equipment. Then TSMC or Samsung or Micron don't fabricate chips, their business is essentially building new fabs for independent third parties. At which point they stop worrying about "overcapacity" because their profit only comes from building more fabs. Then someone like Apple or AMD goes and contracts with the independent fabs to produce their designs, only now each facility is a separate company in competition with the others.
Meanwhile the companies that produce the equipment would then be smaller (because less vertical integration) which lowers the capital requirements to enter into that market. And if you lower it enough then they all end up in cross-licensing agreements and the only requirement to enter is to develop ~1/Nth of the next generation's improvements where N is the number of existing companies, so that they each want to license yours as much as you do theirs.
The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.
I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations.
> Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure.
Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
> Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company.
This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
> Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
Let's do that then.
> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.
> Let's do [an 1880s-1910s level push for antitrust enforcement] then.
The last time that happened was a pre-globalized world, multiple decades of building pressure (including the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act), and the youngest US president to ever assume office (Teddy Roosevelt).
That's a confluence of events I'm not betting on naturally replicating.
Step 1 would be passing an update to the Sherman Act through Congress that would survive the current Supreme Court.
> Step 1 would be passing an update to the Sherman Act through Congress that would survive the current Supreme Court.
The nice thing about antitrust laws is that they're right in the core of the interstate commerce clause, so it's a real stretch to find them unconstitutional and in practice that hasn't been what has happened. Instead, because the Sherman Act is extremely broad but not very detailed, they've just been narrowly interpreting it. Which wouldn't work if you would pass something that explicitly spelled out some of the things. Like just go make a list of all the existing antitrust cases where something bad was found not to be a violation and make a line in the new law that explicitly calls out that one as "yes it is". Which deletes all the precedents anyone could use to claim that their bad behavior is allowed, since Congress just explicitly said that it isn't.
Another great improvement would be to allow anyone to sue for antitrust violations instead of requiring the government prosecutor to do it.
It would also help to get some bipartisanship happening. The current Court has a conservative majority but you only need to convince two out of six, and some of them are more partisan than others, which actually gives you two ways to win. One, you make a good argument and convince the reasonable ones. Two, you stir up the conservative base against some California corporations. Probably easier to do the next time there is a Democratic administration because then they'll start kowtowing to the new administration instead of Trump and thereby anger the conservatives again.
Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.
A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.
The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
> When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.
If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.
Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.
> They are the libertarian solution.
They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
> If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus? It might be cheaper for a company to train a replacement than it is to treat employees better. If there's a labor surplus, then the employer has a lot of power of the situation.
> Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do.
Nope. In fact, slavery was contract/property law. There wasn't a government regulation or statute that established or regulated it. That was part of the problem. Slavery was the ultimate in libertarian ideology because it recognized that through whatever means, individuals could end up the property of other individuals. It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america). Slavery was a natural extension of that concept.
The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
> They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry.
That's not a refutation. Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
I do, which is why I think government regulations and actions to break up monopolies is a good thing.
But in a market without government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
> Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus?
That determines things like wages. It doesn't allow companies to do things like cause $1000 in damage to you in order to save $10, because then they'd have to pay you $1000 more than the company that isn't doing that or you'd still go work there instead.
Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
> In fact, slavery was contract/property law.
That seems to have the word "law" in it.
> It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
Which is obviously not something the child consented to.
> You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america).
There are arguments to be made against this, but it's significantly more defensible than doing it without consent. Because then who is going to do it? And how is it really different than e.g. non-dischargeable student loans, a thing the government still does?
> The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
The only role the government serves in a contract to form a cartel is enforcing the contract too, which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
> Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules. It obviously can't allow for unrestricted anti-competitive contracts because then someone with a monopoly on any necessity could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology. But contract law is the government. A government that didn't enforce contracts at all and only enforced laws against violence would be perfectly consistent with it, whereas a government that enforces contracts you never agreed to or that you were forced to sign under duress would not.
> But in a market without unions and government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market? They can choose a different employee and you can choose a different employer.
> I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse or more expensive to customers, or increases market consolidation if a union destroys a company in an industry with high barriers to entry and thereby causes there to be fewer of them.
How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
> Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time. And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
> That seems to have the word "law" in it.
Law isn't the same thing as a regulation. Anyone that proposes a "free market" is looking at a market determined by contract law.
Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
> which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
I agree. My points were more digs at free market absolutism.
> Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules.
No it doesn't. That's silly. You can read up on any libertarian thinker and they'll all happily argue that monopolies actually aren't bad things. A business that can capture a market through scale efficiencies will always be argued as a good thing from the libertarian perspective.
> could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with how you assess it as applying to libertarianism. A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia.
I mean, heck, the entire point of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was how government fails and how society would be much better off if all the smart people got together and formed their own private government in the wilderness (But don't call it government, call it a community organization or whatever). Ironically enough, the main actions of the protagonists was doing a general strike.
> How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market?
As explained earlier, a market can be competitive with either a labor surplus or a labor shortage.
And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights. It becomes harder with a wide market to do that, but not impossible. Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
That's the imbalance.
> The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse
Actually no. You can look up the reasons unions strike and it might surprise you to know it's not always about just getting more money for the union members.
For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
Money is a part of union negotiations, for sure, but often it's also just about making sure union members aren't overworked.
> How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
The "if nobody else is hiring" is the point. That's the thing that happens when you don't have a competitive market, and correspondingly don't have a lot of different employers to choose from.
There is always work to do for the right price and if there is a surplus of labor and competitive markets then it will tend to just make things cost less, which mitigates the lower pay.
> Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time.
It sounds like you're defending intimidation tactics.
> And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
Which is the thing where they really start acting like an abusive monopoly.
> Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
There are plenty of transactions where you're not worried about disputes. You hand money to the vendor, you get a sandwich, if you don't like the sandwich you're not going to sue them but they don't get any more of your money, the end. Transactions that don't all take place at once can use a private third party escrow service with a reputation to uphold etc.
The ability to form contracts enforced by the government is typically more efficient than some of these things, but if you had to go without it you could make it happen.
> A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia
This is the thing where you find the guy who defends Stalin and use it impugn someone who wants to ban leaded gasoline because they both support having the government do things. Extremists are a dull minority and primarily useful to their own opponents when they don't want to contend with a more reasonable version of the argument.
> And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights.
But then you're back to an uncompetitive market. Collusion is anti-competitive and an anti-trust violation.
> Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
And there isn't a lot of evidence that their attempt was even successful, rather than just happening concurrently with events that caused rents to increase for independent reasons.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their attempt was lawful either. Attempting to monopolize a market is an anti-trust violation even if you fail at it.
> You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
When there are a thousand of them, they won't all be the same.
> There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
There is also a cost to replace an employee. You have to find someone new, train them, take the risk that they turn out to be lazy or adversarial etc.
Meanwhile there are many jobs that will hire someone immediately with no qualifications, because they have low pay. So if your existing job sucks that much then you quit immediately and take one of those while searching for a better one. Also, in a market with many employers there would be employers that will do interviews after hours.
> For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
They want more nurses to reduce the workload on nurses and argue patient safety because it's harder to refute. But then they simultaneously lobby for occupational licensing and similar rules that limit the supply of medical professionals, which does the opposite, which is why there is a shortage of doctors and nurses to begin with.
Meanwhile healthcare is one of the industries with the most regulatory capture and that does everything to make sure there isn't a competitive market, so it's not a great example of what happens when there is.
You present a very long list of evidence that proves the current status of the market is not competitive, and illuminates the power imbalance. We probably agree that this is not a self-correcting state.
AFAICT, the difference in perspective is what to do first, with some of us recommending more unionization, and your take being to fix the competitive landscape. IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture. While it probably offends your sensibilities, the how of unionizing is self-explanatory; it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again. It's a worthy goal, but for now, it seems to be a solution for a world with spherical cows and no force of friction.
> IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture.
If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt, or lets you go on strike forever and hires replacements or offshores the work, that hasn't helped you.
If you form a union and the employer is a monopolist, now that company gets even less efficient, and meanwhile now the union prefers rather than opposes the company remaining a monopolist, which makes it even harder to fix the actual problem.
> it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again.
The government solution is to enforce antitrust laws and remove the ones impairing competition. You can do this at multiple levels. If the federal government sucks right now, individual states have their own antitrust laws and many of the regulatory capture rules are state laws to begin with.
The market solution is get all these people you were going to unionize and instead have them pool their resources or raise capital to start a competing company. They already know how to do it because they're already doing it right now, right?
Current US law forces companies to negotiate with a union if it's employees vote for it. That seems like the opposite of a healthy market; it is a market in severe regulatory capture.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal.
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.
That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
> That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing?
Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.
> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?
Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.
> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China
This is literally what has already happened.
The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.
I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
> Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.
You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.
Conversely, it might be great comfort to someone who has a job because their company didn't go out of business. The point of unions isn't to punish business. The point of unions is to empower workers. One of the things workers can do with that power is ensure their business stays afloat and jobs remain, for example policies promoting long term health and stability rather than short term stock price bumps and volatility or corporate strip mining, even if it means executives get smaller bonuses.
The point is rather that the company would go under with our without the union. The union just means the staff aren't plundered along with the electric cables as the shop sinks.
Indeed. I'm not without sympathy for anyone who loses their job. But losing the job due to an anti-working class parasite going belly up is not entirely a tragedy. One less parasite in the world is a good thing.
Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.
The logical conclusion of the scenario being floated here is that if enough workers resist their own exploitation, the "job creators" will take their capital and go... somewhere. And then there will be no jobs.
Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?
The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.
In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.
But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.
Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.
Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.
LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.
It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.
Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.
I work in a bank with collective agreement and three trade unions. We are dropping offshore contracts before we lay off people covered by collective agreement.
The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.
Ironically, China has also proven that you can't easily import expertise. At best, you can "steal" it over a long period of being the current industrial center's gopher.
Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.
Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.
People in the game industry are pretty often out of work anyways, so I don’t know how much there is to lose there. But industry wide unions can help with this, by providing financial assistance to workers laid off from union organized strikes.
That assumes that the union never unfairly exploits the company. I think historical evidence shows that unions sometimes do exploit the company (and that union leaders sometimes exploit the members). Humans exploiting other humans is a flaw of all of us, not just corporate management.
Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
You're trying to minimize the power of the union by quoting dollar amounts, when the whole point of the union is to have power, and the whole point of unionization is to defeat superior dollar amounts by capturing the organizational memory that money cannot buy.
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
It's not just about dollar amounts, it's about security and consequences. If a developer finds out that he got laid off his life is completely upended. If the CEO of microsoft finds out that the subsidiary of a subsidiary goes under, his life doesn't change. One of those two people is in a position of power so much greater than the other that they have absolutely nothing to fear from having to treat a small number of twice removed employees a little more fairly.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
>You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
Why would they be terrified of a handful of employees just for having the ability to influence the company? The point of a union is to improve working conditions and job security, not to murder your bosses and kill off the company. Funny thing about workers is that they like having jobs, especially ones where they have any influence at all. If a company is fearful that treating workers a little more fairly will sink them, the company deserves to go under.
What you say is true but it does not represent the spirit of what has happened historically. Historically the means of production exploit labor vastly more frequently and with greater degrees of extremity than the inverse.
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
The Union is a business too - and it's product is the labor of it's members.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
> We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
Pay is a but a single way in which an employer can attempt to unfairly exploit you.
The rest tends to hide behind culture and opportunity. Unpaid overtime framed as dedication, scope creep framed as growth, on-call expectations framed as ownership, understaffing framed as efficiency. You might find these game developers being abused by a few or all of these examples.
Exploitive companies can borrow against your pride, your fear of falling behind, and your desire to be seen as competent until your baseline becomes always available.
I support that freedom! I just think the idea that all employee-employer relationships are exploitative is wrong. It feels derived from Marx's long discredited labour theory of value.
It is of course possible for an employer to treat employees very poorly and arguably exploit them. But it is also possible for employers to lose money for years such that employees are effectively exploiting the employer.
I can imagine unions being a great force of good in the world, but whether they are or are not is largely down to how they behave, just like individuals, corporations and other organizations & institutions.
A union that bargains collectively for it's members sounds very straightforward and logical.
A union like the NYC hotel union that actively lobbies for fewer hotels feels insane.
Employers having to pay more than they'd prefer to pay for a given type of work/provide better working conditions does not imply "unfair exploitation" of the company by the union, either.
It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
> It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
It's not a market, at all. It's only possible because of federal law that prevents a business from firing employees for unionizing. If it were a market, the business would have to choose to keep unionzed workers voluntarily. The fact that they don't means it's more like the business being held hostage.
The equivalent would be employees being required by law to stay at a company they don't want to work for. Essentially indentured servitude.
An employer can't fire people for unionizing, but there's no law that requires them to accept a union's negotiating demands... Or prevents them from bringing in scabs if the union chooses to strike without pay.
The existence of a union by itself doesn't do anything.
The only power that a union actually has is not showing up to work. And when the union doesn't show up to work, the employer is free to hire someone else to do the work. It's wild to comparing people not showing up to work because an employment agreement hasn't been reached to 'being held hostage'.
Many markets today only exist due to unfair exploitation of its staff, and the exploitation will continue for quite a long time if everyone who unionizes ends up without a job, since that will discourage unionizing at other companies.
We have spent most the last 50 years undoing all of the checks on corporate power that were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. There were literal pitched battles that happened when workers demanded their rights. Here's hoping the transition this time will be less painful (and actually gets repeated at all).
The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
There are a lot of defacto cartels where all of the corporations determine a ceiling on wages they won't go over.
There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
> There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.
Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?
And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.
What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?
Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g
a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.
You're asking me to prove a negative. Bosses at other companies have been caught locking employees in factories and physically preventing them from leaving.
Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.
Do you have evidence that Id is being subject to some sort of no poach deal?
Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.
Doesn't need it to justify unionizing. Unionizing is a right, and it was previously not exercised because there was no evidence of the will of the market to defraud or conspire against workers. It is now written plain for all to see that indeed, these types of arrangements are kept in board members back pockets. It is not their job to protect a companies interest in renumeration execs and shareholders. It is their job to get their share in spite of the management class's proven track records of the proclivity to engage in shenanigans and lies.
The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.
> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.
> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year.
> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees
If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.
People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.
> If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.
C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.
> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
The rule is vacated by an injunction.
> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.
So you're asking to prove a negative with respect to blacklisting?
Some factories have been caught physically locking employees in the building and not letting them leave. Can I say with certainty that this isn't happening at Id? No, but it's still not valid to baselessly assert that it is happening at Id Technologies because other instances of this behavior have been documented.
The fact that desirable jobs like game dev means employers don't have to compete as hard to attract talent. That's not infringing on game developers' rights. Game developers have the ability to work in jobs other than game dev. If they choose not to pursue those opportunities that's a choice they're making on their own initiative, not an infringement on their rights.
Workers rights like safe working environments, minimum wage, and other laws still apply to game devs.
You are correct. Unions do not exist to exploit employers, they exist precisely to make working conditions acceptable (livable) and no more, most of the time. There are outliers, like Police unions, which have ulterior motives, but on the whole it is a labor movement meant to prevent the abhorrent conditions to which capitalism naturally backslides, which we saw after the industrial revolution.
This collusion affected 8 companies, and stopped over a decade and a half ago. Is there any evidence that Id employees are being subject to this kind of no poach agreement?
What if that unfair exploitation is perfectly normal behavior in overseas markets that happen to be competing? I guess we've been over the consequences of the globalization-driven equilibrium ad nauseam so no need to harp on it but it's still unfortunate.
> If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.
These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
That's not at all what the statement I replied to says in context.
hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."
popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"
That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
You’re reading an extra claim into it. It’s not saying “all post-union failures prove exploitation.” It’s saying “if survival requires unfair exploitation, then losing that advantage exposes an illegitimate model.”
I see no implication that all failing businesses after unionization is due to exploitation.
There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.
I see this low IQ argument template everywhere now: simply declare your opinion a "basic human right" and then declare anyone with a different opinion unworthy of engagement because they are "against human rights". It's impossible to engage with in good faith.
> There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.
Like sweatshops for example. The idea that getting anything at all is far better than getting nothing is not new or compelling. It's exactly that kind of race to the bottom mentality where workers are expected to shut up and take whatever scraps their masters give them that causes labor movements to rise up and start demanding better.
I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.
Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.
They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.
Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.
And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.
There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .
The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.
My point is exactly that the union didn't do what was best for its members because their actions collapsed the company.
Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.
Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
Looking through the history of the company, it seems like the lack of making a profit for the last 25 years and taking on huge debt may have contributed way more to their demise than anything the union did.
Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.
I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.
If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman
Well, this economic downturn might have something to do with the games industry continuing to push out products that nobody wanted (or were no good in the first place) at absolutely lavish budgets. It didn't seemingly come out of nowhere.
Cue Concorde.
If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.
They did not, but since the parent comment alluded to there being financial trouble, I was just pointing out one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the AAA industry is not in a good spot right now, I remember there being an article that there was not a single AAA game at some point in the Steam Best Sellers list.
id and Bethesda isn't doing quite so badly, but their most recent games have been meh.
There are movie flops, yet also there is an actors union. Workers are allowed to be paid even if management makes bad decisions. The company can go bankrupt, doesn't mean workers shouldn't get paid.
Are being wages owed here? If so, the company either can't pay them, and should be considered bankrupt, or is unlawfully holding them back, in which case they should be sued.
The parent was implying a common argument that a union will drive a company out of business. I'm saying, if there are poor decisions that drive a company out of business, then employees should still be paid. It doesn't make sense that employees should prop up the company by taking a pay cut.
This is true, but there's still the problem of how things are distributed within the collective groups.
When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.
I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.
Unpopular opinion but I'm okay with treating union members better than non.
It's good to know that once you make it you are safe. It's okay to grind and give 110% on the come-up. Unsustainable drive, passion, fire. But there has got to be a point where you can ease off to giving 90%, even 85%.
Jobs are a part of society, and the society needs to create structures that make room for people to pull back and focus on other things like raising a family.
The way author was treated seem terrible, but I don't understad an accomplished composer would accept a contract where all penalties for deadline are on him, instead of having variable deadlines based on deliverables? And starts working before the contract is finalized but sign the contract with the original delivery dates, starting on a project already late?
When companies aren't doing well either, demanding more money will only result in bankrupt companies and out sourcing.
It's probably the worst time to do it.
I've only seen unions work well in the long-run with government jobs. The USPS is a good example. Mostly because you really can't fire the workers and the main entity won't ever go out of business because of government bailouts.
interesting to see in the replies such incredible pearl clutching on behalf of the poor, poor businesses whenever unionization gets brought up. brain folds lighting up like a fireworks show just to combat the idea of [checks scroll] uhh not exploiting workers.
The problem is that there is actually an abundance of resources available, they're just horribly imbalanced. There's an entire megathread complaining about RAM prices, and very few people have said "maybe one single person shouldn't be allowed to make computers expensive for the entire rest of the planet".
In professional sports, the player's union helps raise athlete salaries and improve working conditions and that does ultimately come out of the owner's pockets.
Easy counterexample: safety. Unions have historically been on the forefront of safety improvements. Not having workers mutilated or killed -> increased wealth for all. That's not a zero-sum game.
And if you think this doesn't matter for game programmers, look at how many overworked people in the past few years have gotten in car crashes while driving home. Fatigue kills.
I don't understand the video game industry from an insider perspective, but is it wise for id Software to unionize after Doom: The Dark Ages didn't do as well as Eternal? I haven't spoken to anyone who mentioned D:TDA IRL, but knew a fair amount of people who preordered Eternal.
I'm not a fan of parrying in any game and mentally put Eternal into the "Wait for cheap Steam sale" pile when I saw the shield. I wanna rip and tear in Doom.
Funny how the "story" doesn't link to the announcement it mostly copied from the CWA.[1]
Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.
Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.
A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood.
Some terms from TAG's standard contract:
All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or
forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times
the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.
Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of
the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly
rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on
the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two
(2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's
classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours
(including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be
Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly
rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]
This encourages management to schedule realistically.
The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.
Member of a union here -- two, in fact! -- in unrelated industries. "1.5x for overtime, 2x for 7th day" is pretty standard. If they were hourly employees and not getting a deal similar to this before, they were getting ripped off.
Would you mind explaining the difference between industrial vs trade union? Would something like the janitorial staff of a building owned by a gaming company be covered in an industrial union?
Ask Google about "difference between industrial and craft union".
There's US labor history involved. The AFL-CIO was formed by a 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL was the umbrella organization for the craft unions - electricians, plumbers, etc. The CIO was the umbrella organization for the industrial unions - everybody non-management in an auto plant, everybody non-management in a steel mill, etc. That's what "wall to wall" means.
Agreeing on the bargaining unit is a major issue in employer-union relations. A "wall to wall" agreement avoids internal issues over who can do what job. (Is plumbing for compressed air a plumber or a steamfitter job?) That helps the employer. But it gives the union more leverage over the employer because the union has all the employees.
Industrial unions organize by shop; craft unions organize by trade. Industrial unions have much greater leverage because they can (theoretically) change conditions for the entire workplace, not just for one group of workers in the workplace. Historically, this meant, for example, organizing everyone in the auto factory in one union as “auto workers” instead of having machinists in one union, engravers in another union, mechanics in another, etc.
Yeah that's happened to me too, better than nothing though!
Luckily my current work comps my time into PTO and they are generally fairly accurate. Definitely an exception though. This is the only job I've had in the games industry that has done this for me.
I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this?
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.
This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
> This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
When people complain about game devs being exempt, I think they're usually not complaining that salaries are too low - they're generally fine these days - but the expectation of 80+ hour weeks during 'crunch' when crunch often lasts 6+ months. Doing hours like that for a long period of time is destructive to health and to family ties.
> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.
Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
Btw what was the outcome of that?
AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
> Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
> That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
> As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
Unions represent LGBT workers, of course they advocate on behalf of their members. It's quite literally why they exist.
Remember, unions are democratic organizations, they do what their members want. It turns out union members want comprehensive protections against discrimination in the workplace.
If the protection of workers' rights triggers someone, perhaps unions aren't for them and they'd be better off joining a club or something.
> Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.
The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.
If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
People dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company.
Trying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.
I've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)
Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.
The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?
Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.
It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2.... I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
Let's try to be honest when we discuss this kind of thing; Unions are like people. They have unique agendas, unique executive decisionmaking trends, and affect their members differently.
No single union is 1:1 alike.
When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job.
He quit. He was a 15yrold teenager just trying ro have an after school job and he got squeezed.
Unions are not good.
Unions are not bad.
Unions are.
I am eager to see how this specific union engages with the game development industry.
I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).
Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.
People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.
All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."
Similarly, I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of immigration.
I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.
I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.
So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.
IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.
I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.
I think unions are great but they are deeply flawed, like any human organization, but for my family they really worked and both my parents had good jobs in unions. My dad's union both saved him from being fired and also tried to get him fired themselves (he pissed off an up and coming union leader who then proceeded to lie about him). They always seemed like an important counterweight more than actually a great organization (and you actually have a vote, unlike most companies).
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.
If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.
So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.
I encourage HN readers to read your username before replying to this comment. And also to consider why self-identifying capitalists like yourself might want a large cheap labor pool of people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions.
For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call ICE on native-born citizens for trying to unionize if they could.
The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.
Take it up with your fellow “caps” then, they’re the ones that support expanding this category of workers that have fewer political rights. The labor unions clearly only about immigration issues insofar as it relates to trying to weaken labor laws.
You were the one who changed subject to be about “switching jobs”, presumably because that issue has less to do why companies want to hire non-citizens in the US. Up until that point we were talking about employees advocating for rights at their current jobs, which is the main thing undocumented workers or people on work visas have to worry about. You were clearly trying to go for the “just change jobs if you don’t like your employer” thing, which is why you changed the subject (and then accused me of doing that, for some weird reason).
"Unions" are a broad category of human organization, like "business." It makes little sense to favor or oppose "business" in general, and similarly for "unions." I encourage everyone to better understand the specific organizations they support or oppose, unions or otherwise.
Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing.
An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment.
Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the cost of labor being too high for some employers, resulting in fewer jobs. Similarly, unions can prevent wages from adjusting to market conditions.
So for the common good, individuals may go without a job.
For markets to operate well, prices must be easily accessible by both buyers and sellers. Since corporations do their utmost to ensure that workers don't discover wages and salaries of their peers, corporations suppress wages. So, corporations are bad for the common good.
The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.
Unions are part of the market like anything else. If wages are higher, they aren't above market-clearing levels, those are the new market-clearing levels. If workers form a union and bargain collectively, that is what the market naturally set.
Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.
And I bet COSTCO membership-based, warehouse-club model is a bad thing too, since they are able to negotiate prices lower that what the market would naturally set?
Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.
In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.
Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.
This is good news. I'd take it even further. I would like to see a requirement for responsibility in the code we write, like Civil Engineers have.
We have no way of defending our jobs. If we build it and it breaks, it's on us. If we find it unsafe, and provide alternatives that cost more / take longer our job is on the line.
If we feel we cannot humanly review the insane amount of AI slop PRs coming in, because we have a sense of ownership, because it is OUR name on the document, it's on us.
The problem is that unions are only as strong as the NLRB which depends on the current administration. One of Trump's first actions was firing of a democratic member making them unable to form quorum, so it's not looking good for the rest of his term and the supreme court is likely going to bless that firing making it even more susceptible to executive branch meddling in the future.
I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
as much as i hate tech bros that think the solution to every social problem is a new saas app, there are two pieces of tech that would be great for workers:
1) for people that aren't in a union, make labor lawyers easy to use. there could be an app used to walk you through gathering evidence about various workplace violations (osha/safety stuff, wage theft, etc) and then hook you up with lawyers in a two-sided marketplace. workers would get easy represenation, lawyers would get a stream of clients that show up with a nicely formatted bundle of evidence. it could even work to find conneted cases could get bundled into class actions.
2) when everybody worked in the same office/shop floor, you could easily commiserate and start discussions about unionization and collective action. if you're an app-mediated gig-worker (uber drivers, door-dashers, etc) you don't know how to connect with your coworkers. there needs to be a social platform where people would be able to make these connections. to do this, you'd need a way to verify that users are actual employees and put in various protections to make sure management isn't spying on them.
Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.
An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.
The first one lends itself to a revenue model really naturally, but I think it’d be hard to make number two into a business. It’s not clear how to monetize it while also maintaining a really high degree of trust
As a non gaming engineer, I dont want a union, what I really want is solid (really, harsh) enforcement of basic common sense labor rules for exempt workers like weekly working hour limits, no after hours scheduling or minimum notice/severance period for layoffs & many other abuses. Problem is tech industry does not wants to give an inch and workers don't complain because of higher pay and 'lottery ticket' effect.
I fear the time for fixing this is passing fast. Its because within a decade AI will have enough of labor displacement that labor wont have any negotiating leverage against capital. If this happens with union, so be it.
OK, so if you don't want a union, but you want to achieve goals which are typically fought for by unions, what exactly is the alternative mechanism you propose for achieving these goals?
This sounds to me like "I don't want memory protection, what I really want is for my computer to solidly enforce common sense memory barriers", or "I don't want defense attorneys, what I really want is courts to provide common sense advocacy for defendants". Somebody has to do the work, and you're naming the component of the system which provides the features you want.
The universe maximizes entropy, not common sense. The tech industry doesn't want to give an inch for the same reason a dropped object falls to earth: there is no force suggesting it do anything else.
I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Automotive plants have large factories, but when the primary assets are intangible intellectual property, I don’t understand how much power a union really has.
Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.
That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.
Not necessarily - many games have custom engines underpinned by a decade of arcane tech that you wont find anywhere in the world outside the company.
It sucks both for you and the company if they have to replace you.
In contrast, if you work building SaaS apps on top of k8s, you can both transfer your skills easily, and the company can replace you easier.
It could go both ways, but in practice it usually turns out that if your skills are transferable you make more money.
This thing also popped up in the gaming industry, with Unreal becoming popular, and people using it making much more and jumping between projects, because their skills are transferable.
Federal law makes it illegal to retaliate against people for forming a union. Companies still do, and there's no law saying they have to keep hiring in that unit, but if they fire everyone they will probably lose the resulting lawsuit.
It's probably even more effective than other industries. Most industries you have good/bad workers but in software there is a few engineers where you cannot lose them. Who cares about scabs/replacements/etc. like literally no one has their specific domain knowledge.
> I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Gamers are very passionate about their games and the companies behind them. They are also very anti-AI, pro consumer rights, and pro unions. At least the vocal majority of gamers, such as on /r/games, which is where a good portion of gaming journalists get their takes.
It would be the end of id Software from a PR standpoint if they fired union developers responsible for their beloved titles, specifically the recent DOOM titles. The bad PR would also extend to ZeniMax, Bethesda, and Microsoft.
That said, gamers are also the worst at voting with their wallet. Despite all the bad union PR Rockstar North is receiving, pretty much everyone in support of the fired employees will probably still end up buying GTA6 because of FOMO and hype.
Deprived of all options by the manifest oppression of the Republican Party, American youths of today face the grim choice between shoplifting Louis Vuitton below their AG’s prosecution threshold or working several hours a week in the shadow of the menacing smokestacks of ID Software to afford their meager iPhones. Affluent Ugandans make monthly donations to American charities who will send them pictures of smiling American 20-something’s named “Jaden” their charity has lifted out of complete destitution and given hope of owning their own Miami condo.
I think it's both - while game devs experience more hardship than regular devs do, I'd say they still constitute an insanely fortunate slice of society, not exactly Oliver Twist.
From the article, remote work seems to be the crux of the issue - I do think devs should get it but the pity party they hold for themselves is kinda tone deaf imo
Why wouldn't you defend the executives. They lead the company, so they have the power to make decisions on how it should operate. They will always have the power to choose how it operates union or not. Forming a union is just a power grab for the union.
Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.
You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.
Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.
> somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery"
I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes, because my entire point is that the outcome doesn't matter: at some threshold value and below, the existence of the org itself is immoral. We don't have to agree on where that point is, but its existence shouldn't be up for debate, IMO.
I hope we can all agree that a slave plantation should not exist in 2025, regardless of whether it's making billions in quarterly profit, or hovering above insolvency. Paying workers at this plantation $0.01 per hour isn't okay, either, but if you keep adding $0.01/hr N times (and incrementally improve working conditions), you'll eventually arrive at the threshold I was describing.
> I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes
For a slight perspective change, the thing that leads to what they mentioned: They're saying you forgot about the range 1:1 to 0:1.
>Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.
What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management?
There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
Not all of those were instances of the management purposely screwing people, but let's suppose some of them were. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?
Not all businesses fail because of unions, but let's suppose some of them did. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?
It goes both ways. There are plenty of nations with strong unions throughout. In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
The fact that someone can pull up an example where a union caused a business to go under doesn't make me think "we should eliminate unions". It doesn't even make me think "We should limit union negotiation powers" primarily because unions rights have been curtailed since the Reagan era.
If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
> It goes both ways.
That's the point. We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it, instead of saying "what about those other guys" to justify the bad behavior of either of them.
> In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
You're referring to some of the least efficient industries in the US with high levels of regulatory capture. The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship" (i.e. permission from an incumbent), is one of the big reasons construction costs so much, people can't afford housing and government construction projects consistently blow the budget.
> If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
Most "worker protections" are nothing better than highly inefficient alternatives to unemployment insurance. If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure. If you don't have competitive markets then you're unconditionally screwed and the first thing you need is to fix that.
> We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it, instead of saying "what about those other guys" to justify the bad behavior of either of them.
Im not justifying anyone, I'm suggesting a pragmatic, imperfect solution to a clear power imbalance. There's only one way to treat a counterpart who repeatedly defects on the iterated prisoners dilemma, and its not waiting for them to unilaterally start cooperating.
> There's only one way to treat a counterpart who repeatedly defects on the iterated prisoners dilemma, and its not waiting for them to unilaterally start cooperating.
Except that there isn't only one way, there are two. The first is that you keep playing with the defector and start defecting yourself, hoping that they unilaterally start cooperating. The second is that you quit playing with the defector and go play with someone else. And which one of those is likely to work out better for you?
Now apply your 2 options to American workers and see which one's feasible.
How is it infeasible to quit working for someone and go work for someone else?
When employers act like cartels and connive to not compete on salary, directly[1] or indirectly[2]
1. E.g. Steve Job's email to Eric Schmidt
2. E.g. the Work Number as a specific instance
> We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it
I'll agree to that. But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment. The place where change needs to happen is in management. But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.
> You're referring to some of the least efficient
Least efficient how? Because it's expensive?
> high levels of regulatory capture.
No. Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market. The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no". There's a billion different companies in any given city that do trade work.
> The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship"
For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high. There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).
> If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure.
That's wishful thinking assuming that a competitive market can't also be exclusive, hard to enter, or oversaturated. There are things that naturally can't be competitive, usually involving high levels of skill or knowledge. For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.
> But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment.
It's possible that those two sentences are related.
> But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.
So to some extent the premise needs to be challenged. If e.g. Kmart fails, but there are a zillion others to take its place for workers and customers, then its failure is primarily of impact to its shareholders and it's their fault for hiring shortsighted fools to run it. The people who used to work there can just work somewhere else.
If e.g. GE fails, and it was the primary company sustaining some industry in the US, that doesn't work because now nobody is doing that here anymore. But the problem then isn't that they failed, it's that they didn't have enough domestic competitors to begin with. Mismanaged companies are supposed to fail, what they're not supposed to do is take the domestic industry with them.
> Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market.
That's literally the same thing. "New employees" and "competitors" are synonyms.
> The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no".
So zoning rules can't be regulatory capture for the housing market, even if they're unambiguously limiting supply and raising costs, because there is no oligopoly?
> For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high.
It works for truck drivers and lawyers and real estate brokers etc.
Meanwhile the assumption is that the apprenticeship requirement would have higher standards, but it doesn't. It's even less effective. All it is in most places is a time requirement. If your overseer has you doing nothing but wrote physical labor of a uniform type that only represents 1% of what you would see if you went out on your own, you've still put in your hours and get your license. And it's far more susceptible to corruption because then people sign off on hours not actually performed in cases of nepotism etc.
> There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).
That's just another example of trade organizations capturing the regulators. The fact that they use the AMA instead of a union doesn't change the nature of it.
> For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.
Sure it can. Prohibit vertical integration. Make all the fabs contract fabs (most of the state of the art ones already are) and then separate the facilities from the production equipment. Then TSMC or Samsung or Micron don't fabricate chips, their business is essentially building new fabs for independent third parties. At which point they stop worrying about "overcapacity" because their profit only comes from building more fabs. Then someone like Apple or AMD goes and contracts with the independent fabs to produce their designs, only now each facility is a separate company in competition with the others.
Meanwhile the companies that produce the equipment would then be smaller (because less vertical integration) which lowers the capital requirements to enter into that market. And if you lower it enough then they all end up in cross-licensing agreements and the only requirement to enter is to develop ~1/Nth of the next generation's improvements where N is the number of existing companies, so that they each want to license yours as much as you do theirs.
The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.
> What are you talking about?
I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations.
> Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
Unions are part of a healthy market economy. The succesful suppression of unions is a market failure.
Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure.
Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
> Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company.
This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
So why not improve things in the meantime?
> Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
Let's do that then.
> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.
> Let's do [an 1880s-1910s level push for antitrust enforcement] then.
The last time that happened was a pre-globalized world, multiple decades of building pressure (including the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act), and the youngest US president to ever assume office (Teddy Roosevelt).
That's a confluence of events I'm not betting on naturally replicating.
Step 1 would be passing an update to the Sherman Act through Congress that would survive the current Supreme Court.
> Step 1 would be passing an update to the Sherman Act through Congress that would survive the current Supreme Court.
The nice thing about antitrust laws is that they're right in the core of the interstate commerce clause, so it's a real stretch to find them unconstitutional and in practice that hasn't been what has happened. Instead, because the Sherman Act is extremely broad but not very detailed, they've just been narrowly interpreting it. Which wouldn't work if you would pass something that explicitly spelled out some of the things. Like just go make a list of all the existing antitrust cases where something bad was found not to be a violation and make a line in the new law that explicitly calls out that one as "yes it is". Which deletes all the precedents anyone could use to claim that their bad behavior is allowed, since Congress just explicitly said that it isn't.
Another great improvement would be to allow anyone to sue for antitrust violations instead of requiring the government prosecutor to do it.
It would also help to get some bipartisanship happening. The current Court has a conservative majority but you only need to convince two out of six, and some of them are more partisan than others, which actually gives you two ways to win. One, you make a good argument and convince the reasonable ones. Two, you stir up the conservative base against some California corporations. Probably easier to do the next time there is a Democratic administration because then they'll start kowtowing to the new administration instead of Trump and thereby anger the conservatives again.
Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.
A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.
The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
> When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.
If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.
Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.
> They are the libertarian solution.
They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
> If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus? It might be cheaper for a company to train a replacement than it is to treat employees better. If there's a labor surplus, then the employer has a lot of power of the situation.
> Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do.
Nope. In fact, slavery was contract/property law. There wasn't a government regulation or statute that established or regulated it. That was part of the problem. Slavery was the ultimate in libertarian ideology because it recognized that through whatever means, individuals could end up the property of other individuals. It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america). Slavery was a natural extension of that concept.
The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
> They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry.
That's not a refutation. Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
I do, which is why I think government regulations and actions to break up monopolies is a good thing.
But in a market without government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
> Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus?
That determines things like wages. It doesn't allow companies to do things like cause $1000 in damage to you in order to save $10, because then they'd have to pay you $1000 more than the company that isn't doing that or you'd still go work there instead.
Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
> In fact, slavery was contract/property law.
That seems to have the word "law" in it.
> It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
Which is obviously not something the child consented to.
> You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america).
There are arguments to be made against this, but it's significantly more defensible than doing it without consent. Because then who is going to do it? And how is it really different than e.g. non-dischargeable student loans, a thing the government still does?
> The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
The only role the government serves in a contract to form a cartel is enforcing the contract too, which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
> Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules. It obviously can't allow for unrestricted anti-competitive contracts because then someone with a monopoly on any necessity could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology. But contract law is the government. A government that didn't enforce contracts at all and only enforced laws against violence would be perfectly consistent with it, whereas a government that enforces contracts you never agreed to or that you were forced to sign under duress would not.
> But in a market without unions and government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market? They can choose a different employee and you can choose a different employer.
> I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse or more expensive to customers, or increases market consolidation if a union destroys a company in an industry with high barriers to entry and thereby causes there to be fewer of them.
> That determines things like wages.
How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
> Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time. And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
> That seems to have the word "law" in it.
Law isn't the same thing as a regulation. Anyone that proposes a "free market" is looking at a market determined by contract law.
Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
> which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
I agree. My points were more digs at free market absolutism.
> Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules.
No it doesn't. That's silly. You can read up on any libertarian thinker and they'll all happily argue that monopolies actually aren't bad things. A business that can capture a market through scale efficiencies will always be argued as a good thing from the libertarian perspective.
> could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with how you assess it as applying to libertarianism. A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia.
I mean, heck, the entire point of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was how government fails and how society would be much better off if all the smart people got together and formed their own private government in the wilderness (But don't call it government, call it a community organization or whatever). Ironically enough, the main actions of the protagonists was doing a general strike.
> How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market?
As explained earlier, a market can be competitive with either a labor surplus or a labor shortage.
And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights. It becomes harder with a wide market to do that, but not impossible. Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
That's the imbalance.
> The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse
Actually no. You can look up the reasons unions strike and it might surprise you to know it's not always about just getting more money for the union members.
For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
Money is a part of union negotiations, for sure, but often it's also just about making sure union members aren't overworked.
[1] https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/usc-nurses-hold-t...
> How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
The "if nobody else is hiring" is the point. That's the thing that happens when you don't have a competitive market, and correspondingly don't have a lot of different employers to choose from.
There is always work to do for the right price and if there is a surplus of labor and competitive markets then it will tend to just make things cost less, which mitigates the lower pay.
> Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time.
It sounds like you're defending intimidation tactics.
> And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
Which is the thing where they really start acting like an abusive monopoly.
> Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
There are plenty of transactions where you're not worried about disputes. You hand money to the vendor, you get a sandwich, if you don't like the sandwich you're not going to sue them but they don't get any more of your money, the end. Transactions that don't all take place at once can use a private third party escrow service with a reputation to uphold etc.
The ability to form contracts enforced by the government is typically more efficient than some of these things, but if you had to go without it you could make it happen.
> A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia
This is the thing where you find the guy who defends Stalin and use it impugn someone who wants to ban leaded gasoline because they both support having the government do things. Extremists are a dull minority and primarily useful to their own opponents when they don't want to contend with a more reasonable version of the argument.
> And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights.
But then you're back to an uncompetitive market. Collusion is anti-competitive and an anti-trust violation.
> Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
And there isn't a lot of evidence that their attempt was even successful, rather than just happening concurrently with events that caused rents to increase for independent reasons.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their attempt was lawful either. Attempting to monopolize a market is an anti-trust violation even if you fail at it.
> You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
When there are a thousand of them, they won't all be the same.
> There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
There is also a cost to replace an employee. You have to find someone new, train them, take the risk that they turn out to be lazy or adversarial etc.
Meanwhile there are many jobs that will hire someone immediately with no qualifications, because they have low pay. So if your existing job sucks that much then you quit immediately and take one of those while searching for a better one. Also, in a market with many employers there would be employers that will do interviews after hours.
> For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
They want more nurses to reduce the workload on nurses and argue patient safety because it's harder to refute. But then they simultaneously lobby for occupational licensing and similar rules that limit the supply of medical professionals, which does the opposite, which is why there is a shortage of doctors and nurses to begin with.
Meanwhile healthcare is one of the industries with the most regulatory capture and that does everything to make sure there isn't a competitive market, so it's not a great example of what happens when there is.
You present a very long list of evidence that proves the current status of the market is not competitive, and illuminates the power imbalance. We probably agree that this is not a self-correcting state.
AFAICT, the difference in perspective is what to do first, with some of us recommending more unionization, and your take being to fix the competitive landscape. IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture. While it probably offends your sensibilities, the how of unionizing is self-explanatory; it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again. It's a worthy goal, but for now, it seems to be a solution for a world with spherical cows and no force of friction.
> IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture.
If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt, or lets you go on strike forever and hires replacements or offshores the work, that hasn't helped you.
If you form a union and the employer is a monopolist, now that company gets even less efficient, and meanwhile now the union prefers rather than opposes the company remaining a monopolist, which makes it even harder to fix the actual problem.
> it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again.
The government solution is to enforce antitrust laws and remove the ones impairing competition. You can do this at multiple levels. If the federal government sucks right now, individual states have their own antitrust laws and many of the regulatory capture rules are state laws to begin with.
The market solution is get all these people you were going to unionize and instead have them pool their resources or raise capital to start a competing company. They already know how to do it because they're already doing it right now, right?
Current US law forces companies to negotiate with a union if it's employees vote for it. That seems like the opposite of a healthy market; it is a market in severe regulatory capture.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal.
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.
Helped along by a little clandestine sabotage, of course.
We've also seen collective ruin many many times when societies have embraced economic and market concepts. Seen the rust belt anytime lately?
That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
> That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing?
Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.
> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?
Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.
> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China
This is literally what has already happened.
The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.
I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
> Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.
You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
It's almost as if there is no silver bullet to these problems and we have to better than rely on dogma like "unions always good"
Paying employees is part of the market. Why is the counter argument, that we should not pay employees even a thing these days?
Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth.
Could it be because literally lives are cheap.
Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.
In abstract discussions about hypothetical situations, you can imagine things turning out however you like.
Conversely, it might be great comfort to someone who has a job because their company didn't go out of business. The point of unions isn't to punish business. The point of unions is to empower workers. One of the things workers can do with that power is ensure their business stays afloat and jobs remain, for example policies promoting long term health and stability rather than short term stock price bumps and volatility or corporate strip mining, even if it means executives get smaller bonuses.
The point is rather that the company would go under with our without the union. The union just means the staff aren't plundered along with the electric cables as the shop sinks.
Do I want a job that exploits me, or do I want no job at all.
Wow, quite the decision.
Indeed. I'm not without sympathy for anyone who loses their job. But losing the job due to an anti-working class parasite going belly up is not entirely a tragedy. One less parasite in the world is a good thing.
And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".
> And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".
Comparing software development jobs in the modern United States to slavery is quite fanciful.
Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.
Except unlike slaves, these software developers are free to quit and take a competing job offer.
The logical conclusion of the scenario being floated here is that if enough workers resist their own exploitation, the "job creators" will take their capital and go... somewhere. And then there will be no jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Until the companies start colluding to suppress your wages.
Still not even remotely comparable to owning human beings as property.
Regardless, the government cracked down on this behavior (which affected 8 companies) and it stopped in 20009 as per your link.
It's still going on now - they just use a third party to help them collude.
What third party is enforcing an anti-poaching agreement? Can you back up that claim with evidence?
Cold comfort.
Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?
The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.
In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.
But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.
Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.
Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.
LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.
It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.
Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.
edit: fixed the idiom, thanks frmersdog
I work in a bank with collective agreement and three trade unions. We are dropping offshore contracts before we lay off people covered by collective agreement.
The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.
*chomping at the bit.
Ironically, China has also proven that you can't easily import expertise. At best, you can "steal" it over a long period of being the current industrial center's gopher.
Not sure what the original was (now edited), but it's actually "champing at the bit", historically.
Chomping is also correct enough today, descriptivistically speaking.
The film case is kind of wild.
Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.
Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.
People in the game industry are pretty often out of work anyways, so I don’t know how much there is to lose there. But industry wide unions can help with this, by providing financial assistance to workers laid off from union organized strikes.
That assumes that the union never unfairly exploits the company. I think historical evidence shows that unions sometimes do exploit the company (and that union leaders sometimes exploit the members). Humans exploiting other humans is a flaw of all of us, not just corporate management.
Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
You're trying to minimize the power of the union by quoting dollar amounts, when the whole point of the union is to have power, and the whole point of unionization is to defeat superior dollar amounts by capturing the organizational memory that money cannot buy.
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
It's not just about dollar amounts, it's about security and consequences. If a developer finds out that he got laid off his life is completely upended. If the CEO of microsoft finds out that the subsidiary of a subsidiary goes under, his life doesn't change. One of those two people is in a position of power so much greater than the other that they have absolutely nothing to fear from having to treat a small number of twice removed employees a little more fairly.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
>You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
If the union has no power to influence Id Software, what's the point of the union?
Why would they be terrified of a handful of employees just for having the ability to influence the company? The point of a union is to improve working conditions and job security, not to murder your bosses and kill off the company. Funny thing about workers is that they like having jobs, especially ones where they have any influence at all. If a company is fearful that treating workers a little more fairly will sink them, the company deserves to go under.
What you say is true but it does not represent the spirit of what has happened historically. Historically the means of production exploit labor vastly more frequently and with greater degrees of extremity than the inverse.
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
Sometimes, but that’s better than the opposite, which is the default condition.
> That assumes that the union never unfairly exploits the company.
Is that the bar we want a corporate environment to meet? No unfair exploitation of anyone ever?
If so, the existing structures sure as shit don't meet it. Why carry water for them?
The Union is a business too - and it's product is the labor of it's members.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
> We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
See HN discussion of 996: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
I'd like to see the median wage+benefits of the '996' worker vs the median.
I think unions have a place in the lowest margins , but not the 996 tech worker making 2x median salary (my assumption).
Nobody is seriously working 996, unless they choose to.
Employees being paid less than they would prefer to get paid for a given type of work does not imply "unfair exploitation"
Pay is a but a single way in which an employer can attempt to unfairly exploit you.
The rest tends to hide behind culture and opportunity. Unpaid overtime framed as dedication, scope creep framed as growth, on-call expectations framed as ownership, understaffing framed as efficiency. You might find these game developers being abused by a few or all of these examples.
Exploitive companies can borrow against your pride, your fear of falling behind, and your desire to be seen as competent until your baseline becomes always available.
Do you think Salaried software devs should have overtime? Even if paid well (multiples of median salaries across industries).
That’s a fair opinion but obviously it’s the opinion of the employees and their ability to freely associate that let’s them collectively organise.
I support that freedom! I just think the idea that all employee-employer relationships are exploitative is wrong. It feels derived from Marx's long discredited labour theory of value.
It is of course possible for an employer to treat employees very poorly and arguably exploit them. But it is also possible for employers to lose money for years such that employees are effectively exploiting the employer.
I can imagine unions being a great force of good in the world, but whether they are or are not is largely down to how they behave, just like individuals, corporations and other organizations & institutions.
A union that bargains collectively for it's members sounds very straightforward and logical.
A union like the NYC hotel union that actively lobbies for fewer hotels feels insane.
Employers having to pay more than they'd prefer to pay for a given type of work/provide better working conditions does not imply "unfair exploitation" of the company by the union, either.
It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
> It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
It's not a market, at all. It's only possible because of federal law that prevents a business from firing employees for unionizing. If it were a market, the business would have to choose to keep unionzed workers voluntarily. The fact that they don't means it's more like the business being held hostage.
The equivalent would be employees being required by law to stay at a company they don't want to work for. Essentially indentured servitude.
That argument is bullshit, and I'll tell you why.
An employer can't fire people for unionizing, but there's no law that requires them to accept a union's negotiating demands... Or prevents them from bringing in scabs if the union chooses to strike without pay.
The existence of a union by itself doesn't do anything.
The only power that a union actually has is not showing up to work. And when the union doesn't show up to work, the employer is free to hire someone else to do the work. It's wild to comparing people not showing up to work because an employment agreement hasn't been reached to 'being held hostage'.
>no law that requires them to accept a union's negotiating demands
And there shouldn't be
>Or prevents them from bringing in scabs if the union chooses to strike without pay.
The company should have this right.
Many markets today only exist due to unfair exploitation of its staff, and the exploitation will continue for quite a long time if everyone who unionizes ends up without a job, since that will discourage unionizing at other companies.
We have spent most the last 50 years undoing all of the checks on corporate power that were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. There were literal pitched battles that happened when workers demanded their rights. Here's hoping the transition this time will be less painful (and actually gets repeated at all).
The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
Do you think SWE at Meta should unionize?
There are a lot of defacto cartels where all of the corporations determine a ceiling on wages they won't go over.
There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
> There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.
Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?
And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.
This is the magical "perfect competition" view of the market that often doesn't match reality at all.
What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?
Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.
Corporations have been caught colluding to suppress wages by refusing to hire anyone working for one of the other companies.
How many of these collusions have not been brought to light?
Aren't there laws already against that? It's happened before but is it common, do we have evidence that it is prevalent in Software Engineering?
You're asking me to prove a negative. Bosses at other companies have been caught locking employees in factories and physically preventing them from leaving.
Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.
Remember when the tech companies got caught making deals not to poach each other's employees?
Maybe they can just start their own company. Well, you can't for the existing players to peer traffic with you if you need heavy network access.
Do you have evidence that Id is being subject to some sort of no poach deal?
Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.
Doesn't need it to justify unionizing. Unionizing is a right, and it was previously not exercised because there was no evidence of the will of the market to defraud or conspire against workers. It is now written plain for all to see that indeed, these types of arrangements are kept in board members back pockets. It is not their job to protect a companies interest in renumeration execs and shareholders. It is their job to get their share in spite of the management class's proven track records of the proclivity to engage in shenanigans and lies.
The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
I'm not disputing that employees have right to try and form a union.
I'm asking people who are insisting that Id employees are not free to accept competing offers to back up those claims with evidence.
> What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?
* Employer-bound health insurance in the US
* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members
* Noncompetes and NDAs
* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers
> Employer-bound health insurance in the US
Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.
This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?
> Noncompetes
Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.
Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.
> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.
> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year.
> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees
If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.
People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.
> If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.
C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.
> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
The rule is vacated by an injunction.
> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.
So you're asking to prove a negative with respect to blacklisting?
Some factories have been caught physically locking employees in the building and not letting them leave. Can I say with certainty that this isn't happening at Id? No, but it's still not valid to baselessly assert that it is happening at Id Technologies because other instances of this behavior have been documented.
The fact that desirable jobs like game dev means employers don't have to compete as hard to attract talent. That's not infringing on game developers' rights. Game developers have the ability to work in jobs other than game dev. If they choose not to pursue those opportunities that's a choice they're making on their own initiative, not an infringement on their rights.
Workers rights like safe working environments, minimum wage, and other laws still apply to game devs.
WHat's keeping a company from providing fair wages, fair labor practices such that unions are unnecessary?
EDIT: I guess you can just downvote, sure, but why not engage?
You are correct. Unions do not exist to exploit employers, they exist precisely to make working conditions acceptable (livable) and no more, most of the time. There are outliers, like Police unions, which have ulterior motives, but on the whole it is a labor movement meant to prevent the abhorrent conditions to which capitalism naturally backslides, which we saw after the industrial revolution.
Oh, yes, because we've never seen a case where large companies entered into no poach agreements to suppress worker wages, right?
Oh wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Quit the gaslighting.
This collusion affected 8 companies, and stopped over a decade and a half ago. Is there any evidence that Id employees are being subject to this kind of no poach agreement?
So basically almost all game studios should shutdown is what you’re saying.
What if that unfair exploitation is perfectly normal behavior in overseas markets that happen to be competing? I guess we've been over the consequences of the globalization-driven equilibrium ad nauseam so no need to harp on it but it's still unfortunate.
> If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.
These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
The statement wasn't really pro or against unions. Simply put, if your company can only survive while exploiting its workers it shouldn't survive.
Whether that's due to constant turnover from poor treatment of their employees, or due to union strikes, doesn't change the statement.
That's not at all what the statement I replied to says in context.
hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."
popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"
That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
You’re reading an extra claim into it. It’s not saying “all post-union failures prove exploitation.” It’s saying “if survival requires unfair exploitation, then losing that advantage exposes an illegitimate model.”
I see no implication that all failing businesses after unionization is due to exploitation.
That is not my implication, you are reading it incorrectly. The above commenter is reading it correctly.
Your theory only holds in the case that there is unfair exploitation happening. This is not that easy to define beyond salary averages…
The scope of the "theory" is precisely limited to exactly that scenario... so, yeah.
How about comparing wage theft vs shrink - how much is everyone stealing from each other - almost 1 in 5 workers experience wage theft.
"We can't end slavery! The cotton industry would collapse!"
This is a staggeringly stupid take.
There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.
I see this low IQ argument template everywhere now: simply declare your opinion a "basic human right" and then declare anyone with a different opinion unworthy of engagement because they are "against human rights". It's impossible to engage with in good faith.
> There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.
Like sweatshops for example. The idea that getting anything at all is far better than getting nothing is not new or compelling. It's exactly that kind of race to the bottom mentality where workers are expected to shut up and take whatever scraps their masters give them that causes labor movements to rise up and start demanding better.
I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.
Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.
They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.
Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.
And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.
They got ... $700 million bailout from the government and put part of the blame on not being able to secure a $50 million benefits package?
There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .
The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.
This is not a "see unions are bad" example.
My point is exactly that the union didn't do what was best for its members because their actions collapsed the company.
Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.
Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
Looking through the history of the company, it seems like the lack of making a profit for the last 25 years and taking on huge debt may have contributed way more to their demise than anything the union did.
> because their actions collapsed the company
The company blamed the collapse on their actions, different things.
Since that harms the union members the it wouldn't make sense for them to do that intentionally.
Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.
I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.
If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Corporation#cite_note-W...
Well, this economic downturn might have something to do with the games industry continuing to push out products that nobody wanted (or were no good in the first place) at absolutely lavish budgets. It didn't seemingly come out of nowhere.
Cue Concorde.
If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.
I wasn't aware that id software made Concorde.
They did not, but since the parent comment alluded to there being financial trouble, I was just pointing out one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the AAA industry is not in a good spot right now, I remember there being an article that there was not a single AAA game at some point in the Steam Best Sellers list.
id and Bethesda isn't doing quite so badly, but their most recent games have been meh.
There are movie flops, yet also there is an actors union. Workers are allowed to be paid even if management makes bad decisions. The company can go bankrupt, doesn't mean workers shouldn't get paid.
Are being wages owed here? If so, the company either can't pay them, and should be considered bankrupt, or is unlawfully holding them back, in which case they should be sued.
But is this actually the case here?
The parent was implying a common argument that a union will drive a company out of business. I'm saying, if there are poor decisions that drive a company out of business, then employees should still be paid. It doesn't make sense that employees should prop up the company by taking a pay cut.
Aren't less movies now being made in hollywood? Seems
I'm in an area where Netflix and other production companies are building massive studios.
When they're up and running, workers will still be unionized under the same SAG-AFTRA as workers in Hollywood are.
This is true, but there's still the problem of how things are distributed within the collective groups.
When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.
I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.
Unpopular opinion but I'm okay with treating union members better than non.
It's good to know that once you make it you are safe. It's okay to grind and give 110% on the come-up. Unsustainable drive, passion, fire. But there has got to be a point where you can ease off to giving 90%, even 85%.
Jobs are a part of society, and the society needs to create structures that make room for people to pull back and focus on other things like raising a family.
The devs probably looked at what happened to the music dept at Id as a cautionary tale.
What happened to it? Last time I heard only good things about those guys, but that was around the release of DOOM in 2016.
It was a mess behind the scenes for the music contractor. Seemed badly planned and kinda scummy.
The blog: (a long rant)
https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...
The way author was treated seem terrible, but I don't understad an accomplished composer would accept a contract where all penalties for deadline are on him, instead of having variable deadlines based on deliverables? And starts working before the contract is finalized but sign the contract with the original delivery dates, starting on a project already late?
Was he under coercion?
When companies aren't doing well either, demanding more money will only result in bankrupt companies and out sourcing.
It's probably the worst time to do it.
I've only seen unions work well in the long-run with government jobs. The USPS is a good example. Mostly because you really can't fire the workers and the main entity won't ever go out of business because of government bailouts.
Companies are doing amazingly well by any metric. They just refuse to share with their employees.
interesting to see in the replies such incredible pearl clutching on behalf of the poor, poor businesses whenever unionization gets brought up. brain folds lighting up like a fireworks show just to combat the idea of [checks scroll] uhh not exploiting workers.
The problem is that there is actually an abundance of resources available, they're just horribly imbalanced. There's an entire megathread complaining about RAM prices, and very few people have said "maybe one single person shouldn't be allowed to make computers expensive for the entire rest of the planet".
Actually a lot of people are saying that. Almost everyone except for those very few people and the bubble/membrane in their orbit.
In an 'economic downturn' where the rich keep getting richer, at least. This is a very weird downturn.
Wrong, collective action doesn’t change anything. It simply interchanges who gets poorer.
But sometimes that's the goal.
In professional sports, the player's union helps raise athlete salaries and improve working conditions and that does ultimately come out of the owner's pockets.
Easy counterexample: safety. Unions have historically been on the forefront of safety improvements. Not having workers mutilated or killed -> increased wealth for all. That's not a zero-sum game.
And if you think this doesn't matter for game programmers, look at how many overworked people in the past few years have gotten in car crashes while driving home. Fatigue kills.
I don't understand the video game industry from an insider perspective, but is it wise for id Software to unionize after Doom: The Dark Ages didn't do as well as Eternal? I haven't spoken to anyone who mentioned D:TDA IRL, but knew a fair amount of people who preordered Eternal.
TDA was so good timing the parrying. Eternal too, once you play these games the other games are slow in comparison imo.
I'm not a fan of parrying in any game and mentally put Eternal into the "Wait for cheap Steam sale" pile when I saw the shield. I wanna rip and tear in Doom.
Funny how the "story" doesn't link to the announcement it mostly copied from the CWA.[1]
Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.
Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.
A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood. Some terms from TAG's standard contract:
All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]
This encourages management to schedule realistically. The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.
[1] https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-developers-te...
[2] https://code-cwa.org/
[3] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2024-2...
Member of a union here -- two, in fact! -- in unrelated industries. "1.5x for overtime, 2x for 7th day" is pretty standard. If they were hourly employees and not getting a deal similar to this before, they were getting ripped off.
Would you mind explaining the difference between industrial vs trade union? Would something like the janitorial staff of a building owned by a gaming company be covered in an industrial union?
Ask Google about "difference between industrial and craft union".
There's US labor history involved. The AFL-CIO was formed by a 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL was the umbrella organization for the craft unions - electricians, plumbers, etc. The CIO was the umbrella organization for the industrial unions - everybody non-management in an auto plant, everybody non-management in a steel mill, etc. That's what "wall to wall" means.
Agreeing on the bargaining unit is a major issue in employer-union relations. A "wall to wall" agreement avoids internal issues over who can do what job. (Is plumbing for compressed air a plumber or a steamfitter job?) That helps the employer. But it gives the union more leverage over the employer because the union has all the employees.
Industrial unions organize by shop; craft unions organize by trade. Industrial unions have much greater leverage because they can (theoretically) change conditions for the entire workplace, not just for one group of workers in the workplace. Historically, this meant, for example, organizing everyone in the auto factory in one union as “auto workers” instead of having machinists in one union, engravers in another union, mechanics in another, etc.
That sounds great. I've worked so many days where I work 18 hours for zero extra pay. I usually get a free dinner and a cab ride home and that's it.
In my experience, getting management recognition for overtime is an uphill battle.
Even when I did get paid at some elevated rate, if we divided actual hours worked with the money I got, I still made way less than my hourly rate.
Yeah that's happened to me too, better than nothing though!
Luckily my current work comps my time into PTO and they are generally fairly accurate. Definitely an exception though. This is the only job I've had in the games industry that has done this for me.
How quite reasonable.
I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this?
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.
> Everyone is exempt,
This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/ComputerSoftware.htm
> This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
When people complain about game devs being exempt, I think they're usually not complaining that salaries are too low - they're generally fine these days - but the expectation of 80+ hour weeks during 'crunch' when crunch often lasts 6+ months. Doing hours like that for a long period of time is destructive to health and to family ties.
If you enjoy your job your employer is able to exploit you more?
i have a passion for eating, i dont have a passion for dentistry
> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.
Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
But how do you actually bootstrap that process?
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
> But how do you actually bootstrap that process?
I don't know.
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
Btw what was the outcome of that? AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
Legislatively. In most of the Western world, TUPE would have made the manoeuvre impossible.
Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...
Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.
> Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
[0] Ala https://xkcd.com/545/
> That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
[1] https://www.equalrights.org/news/eeocs-decision-to-drop-lgbt...
> As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
Unions represent LGBT workers, of course they advocate on behalf of their members. It's quite literally why they exist.
Remember, unions are democratic organizations, they do what their members want. It turns out union members want comprehensive protections against discrimination in the workplace.
If the protection of workers' rights triggers someone, perhaps unions aren't for them and they'd be better off joining a club or something.
Then vote and change things through voting.
Also, title ix still exists, civil court should take the case.
> Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
According to the article, they are part of the Communications Workers of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...
And CWA is part of AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of unions in the country, representing ~15 million workers.
Situation: There are 14 competing unions.
You: That's ridiculous! We need one universal union that covers everyone's needs. Yeah!
Situation: There are 15 competing unions.
That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.
The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.
If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
Is there an alternative union that you think Id employees should have joined?
With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines.
There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running."
Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
People dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company.
That collapse didn't happen.
Twitter went from being the heartbeat of the internet to X, the second Facebook for your parents to repost catturd2 posts and Pepe memes on.
Their ops teams are probably ground into dust.
For real - this made me laugh, because I had the immediate exact thought. Oh boy
Trying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.
(sorry, replied to wrong comment!)
I've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
yeah, the work I'm proudest of are the projects I've been able to walk away from that still function
They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
Didn’t twitter get 3/4 people laid off? Seems to still work as of time of writing (x.com).
They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)
Also initially they had a lot of breakage.
Also they made an entire separate company X.ai to do Grok and some other stuff which certainly involved hiring people.
Indeed when you have fewer people you generally reduce scope
Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.
The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?
More bots than ever, bots can be interesting , but outside the political intrigue behind their commissioning these bots are not very interesting.
And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.
Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
Every on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.
You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.
It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2.... I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
Let's try to be honest when we discuss this kind of thing; Unions are like people. They have unique agendas, unique executive decisionmaking trends, and affect their members differently.
No single union is 1:1 alike.
When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job.
He quit. He was a 15yrold teenager just trying ro have an after school job and he got squeezed.
Unions are not good. Unions are not bad. Unions are.
I am eager to see how this specific union engages with the game development industry.
I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).
How was my comment dishonest?
Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.
People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.
All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."
Try explaining that to the 15 year old who worked after school each day and after two weeks received a paycheck for $3.
Similarly, I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of immigration.
I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.
I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.
So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.
IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.
I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.
Unions are almost fundamentally against the practice of undercutting them with cheaper labour.
I think unions are great but they are deeply flawed, like any human organization, but for my family they really worked and both my parents had good jobs in unions. My dad's union both saved him from being fired and also tried to get him fired themselves (he pissed off an up and coming union leader who then proceeded to lie about him). They always seemed like an important counterweight more than actually a great organization (and you actually have a vote, unlike most companies).
Of course they did. Unions are always going to be against immigrant labor.
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.
If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.
So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.
That's not true. The MLBPA (baseball players) is definitely not anti-immigrant.
That would make sense considering how abused OPT is. It very fundamentally decreases the unions leverage.
I encourage HN readers to read your username before replying to this comment. And also to consider why self-identifying capitalists like yourself might want a large cheap labor pool of people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions.
For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call ICE on native-born citizens for trying to unionize if they could.
The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.
Take it up with your fellow “caps” then, they’re the ones that support expanding this category of workers that have fewer political rights. The labor unions clearly only about immigration issues insofar as it relates to trying to weaken labor laws.
Can you point me to a capitalist who wants to expand the category of workers without the right to switch jobs?
Sure, anyone who tries to get you to sign one of these: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/10/627682297/regulators-investig...
Nice motte and bailey there between "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions" and non-compete clauses.
You were the one who changed subject to be about “switching jobs”, presumably because that issue has less to do why companies want to hire non-citizens in the US. Up until that point we were talking about employees advocating for rights at their current jobs, which is the main thing undocumented workers or people on work visas have to worry about. You were clearly trying to go for the “just change jobs if you don’t like your employer” thing, which is why you changed the subject (and then accused me of doing that, for some weird reason).
Anyway, two for the price of one, since you’re demanding it: https://www.adhrb.org/2025/02/discrimination-against-migrant...
"Unions" are a broad category of human organization, like "business." It makes little sense to favor or oppose "business" in general, and similarly for "unions." I encourage everyone to better understand the specific organizations they support or oppose, unions or otherwise.
Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing.
An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment.
Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the cost of labor being too high for some employers, resulting in fewer jobs. Similarly, unions can prevent wages from adjusting to market conditions.
So for the common good, individuals may go without a job.
For markets to operate well, prices must be easily accessible by both buyers and sellers. Since corporations do their utmost to ensure that workers don't discover wages and salaries of their peers, corporations suppress wages. So, corporations are bad for the common good.
The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.
Unions are part of the market like anything else. If wages are higher, they aren't above market-clearing levels, those are the new market-clearing levels. If workers form a union and bargain collectively, that is what the market naturally set.
Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.
And I bet COSTCO membership-based, warehouse-club model is a bad thing too, since they are able to negotiate prices lower that what the market would naturally set?
> An econ 101 observation
Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.
In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.
Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.
This is good news. I'd take it even further. I would like to see a requirement for responsibility in the code we write, like Civil Engineers have.
We have no way of defending our jobs. If we build it and it breaks, it's on us. If we find it unsafe, and provide alternatives that cost more / take longer our job is on the line.
If we feel we cannot humanly review the insane amount of AI slop PRs coming in, because we have a sense of ownership, because it is OUR name on the document, it's on us.
Wow, even labor unions can run Doom now!
The problem is that unions are only as strong as the NLRB which depends on the current administration. One of Trump's first actions was firing of a democratic member making them unable to form quorum, so it's not looking good for the rest of his term and the supreme court is likely going to bless that firing making it even more susceptible to executive branch meddling in the future.
I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
as much as i hate tech bros that think the solution to every social problem is a new saas app, there are two pieces of tech that would be great for workers:
1) for people that aren't in a union, make labor lawyers easy to use. there could be an app used to walk you through gathering evidence about various workplace violations (osha/safety stuff, wage theft, etc) and then hook you up with lawyers in a two-sided marketplace. workers would get easy represenation, lawyers would get a stream of clients that show up with a nicely formatted bundle of evidence. it could even work to find conneted cases could get bundled into class actions.
2) when everybody worked in the same office/shop floor, you could easily commiserate and start discussions about unionization and collective action. if you're an app-mediated gig-worker (uber drivers, door-dashers, etc) you don't know how to connect with your coworkers. there needs to be a social platform where people would be able to make these connections. to do this, you'd need a way to verify that users are actual employees and put in various protections to make sure management isn't spying on them.
Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.
An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.
It’s also important to have some line of communication that isn’t owned/monitored by management
Would you be opposed to a tech bro making a startup out of this? :)
No, I’d love to see it!
The first one lends itself to a revenue model really naturally, but I think it’d be hard to make number two into a business. It’s not clear how to monetize it while also maintaining a really high degree of trust
As a non gaming engineer, I dont want a union, what I really want is solid (really, harsh) enforcement of basic common sense labor rules for exempt workers like weekly working hour limits, no after hours scheduling or minimum notice/severance period for layoffs & many other abuses. Problem is tech industry does not wants to give an inch and workers don't complain because of higher pay and 'lottery ticket' effect.
I fear the time for fixing this is passing fast. Its because within a decade AI will have enough of labor displacement that labor wont have any negotiating leverage against capital. If this happens with union, so be it.
I feel like you said you don't want a union and proceeded to describe exactly what a union is supposed to be.
You are 100% a software engineer lol
OK, so if you don't want a union, but you want to achieve goals which are typically fought for by unions, what exactly is the alternative mechanism you propose for achieving these goals?
This sounds to me like "I don't want memory protection, what I really want is for my computer to solidly enforce common sense memory barriers", or "I don't want defense attorneys, what I really want is courts to provide common sense advocacy for defendants". Somebody has to do the work, and you're naming the component of the system which provides the features you want.
The universe maximizes entropy, not common sense. The tech industry doesn't want to give an inch for the same reason a dropped object falls to earth: there is no force suggesting it do anything else.
Congrats to them! Unions are the reason we have (had) an 8 hour day.
And weekends.
It’ll be a bloodbath at Zenimax soon. They have a nasty army of lawyers.
Article is thin on details and full of changing adverts that scroll you up and down whilst reading (on mobile).
Annoying.
I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Automotive plants have large factories, but when the primary assets are intangible intellectual property, I don’t understand how much power a union really has.
If you think all developers are interchangeable you're the reason they're forming a union.
Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.
That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.
NFL players have unique skills, are highly valued, and are represented by a union. Same with most other major sports.
Not necessarily - many games have custom engines underpinned by a decade of arcane tech that you wont find anywhere in the world outside the company.
It sucks both for you and the company if they have to replace you.
In contrast, if you work building SaaS apps on top of k8s, you can both transfer your skills easily, and the company can replace you easier.
It could go both ways, but in practice it usually turns out that if your skills are transferable you make more money.
This thing also popped up in the gaming industry, with Unreal becoming popular, and people using it making much more and jumping between projects, because their skills are transferable.
If software workers were that replaceable, they wouldn't be paid huge salaries to sit in offices in San Francisco, they'd be outsourced already.
(Mind you, that very individualism is why they're not already unionized)
Federal law makes it illegal to retaliate against people for forming a union. Companies still do, and there's no law saying they have to keep hiring in that unit, but if they fire everyone they will probably lose the resulting lawsuit.
It's probably even more effective than other industries. Most industries you have good/bad workers but in software there is a few engineers where you cannot lose them. Who cares about scabs/replacements/etc. like literally no one has their specific domain knowledge.
> I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Gamers are very passionate about their games and the companies behind them. They are also very anti-AI, pro consumer rights, and pro unions. At least the vocal majority of gamers, such as on /r/games, which is where a good portion of gaming journalists get their takes.
It would be the end of id Software from a PR standpoint if they fired union developers responsible for their beloved titles, specifically the recent DOOM titles. The bad PR would also extend to ZeniMax, Bethesda, and Microsoft.
That said, gamers are also the worst at voting with their wallet. Despite all the bad union PR Rockstar North is receiving, pretty much everyone in support of the fired employees will probably still end up buying GTA6 because of FOMO and hype.
> the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone…
This turns out to be a lot harder in practice than in theory.
Somewhere, John Carmack, in his new conservative era, is seething.
I love this for him.
What happened to the Google union?
Curious if this was workers casting off the shackles of their oppression or a luxury option for a group that is already well off?
Deprived of all options by the manifest oppression of the Republican Party, American youths of today face the grim choice between shoplifting Louis Vuitton below their AG’s prosecution threshold or working several hours a week in the shadow of the menacing smokestacks of ID Software to afford their meager iPhones. Affluent Ugandans make monthly donations to American charities who will send them pictures of smiling American 20-something’s named “Jaden” their charity has lifted out of complete destitution and given hope of owning their own Miami condo.
I think it's both - while game devs experience more hardship than regular devs do, I'd say they still constitute an insanely fortunate slice of society, not exactly Oliver Twist.
From the article, remote work seems to be the crux of the issue - I do think devs should get it but the pity party they hold for themselves is kinda tone deaf imo
>RTO policies should not be handed down from executives with no consideration for accessibility or our well-being.
If you don't like it, then quit. No one is forcing you to work for Id Software.
Or form a union and push back - why are you defending ID software executives?
Why wouldn't you defend the executives. They lead the company, so they have the power to make decisions on how it should operate. They will always have the power to choose how it operates union or not. Forming a union is just a power grab for the union.
You are imputing motives that are not in evidence.
This isn’t a court of law sir, this is a message board operated by a venture capitalist fund
I really want to do the "this is a Wendy's" thing, but...
Or unionize... like they did.