- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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Other devs, please follow suit.
This industry needs class consciousness in it yesterday.
Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean you’re not being mistreated.
It’s valid to be thankful for what you have but to also know you deserve more.
I wish developers would learn that just because they’re well paid doesn’t mean they’re getting the full value of their work. Your CEO didn’t become a billionaire by paying you the full value of your labor.
There’s always room for more and unions can get that.
This is from a Swedish perspective, but: My experience with unions has been that they think it’s more important that nobody is paid more, than to pay everyone what they’re worth. In other words they’d prefer everyone being paid equally over raising the minimum wage. Their motivation seems based in jealousy more than a sense of justice. The money they collect from their members is spent on offering stupid IT courses that nobody (except unskilled people) needs, or stuffing their own pockets.
I like the idea of a union, but to me it seems like the actual unions we have today either lack real problems to solve or forgot about them. Every time a representative comes to visit I just get angered by how out of touch they are. They should focus on their core values and get rid of all that idiotic fluff, so they can lower their fees and recruit more members. But like any organization they grew fat and slow.
Lack real problems to solve? Wtf. Also your experience with unions seem very biased.
*or forgot about them.
Ensuring that people know how to use Excel is not a problem that the union should be spending money on.
At my office we can work at any hours of the day that we prefer, as long as we check with our coworkers and do our agreed 40 hours / week. When the union heard about this they told my employer that we must do all our work during daytime.
Their reasoning was that our liberal hours give us the opportunity to take on more obligations in our personal life at daytime (such as taking kids to soccer practice) which means we have to work in evenings to make up for lost time. And this, in turn, means we don’t get enough rest. So basically they don’t trust the employees to take responsibility for how much rest they need and want to stop them from doing personal chores during the day.
We (the employees) finally won against the union in this, but what I kept thinking during this ordeal was “jeez, don’t they have more important issues to address?” If they did, why would they be meddling with this.
Eh, more of a case by case basis in the tech industry imo. Most game studio devs should probably unionize, but it’s not all horror stories everywhere. I’m not against unionization by any means and it’s always on the table, but when me and my coworkers already have great pay, great benefits, stable careers, and great work life balance I don’t really see what additional benefits it would bring. It’s an over-generalization to say that you’ll be earning more money as a union employee when you’re already making more than 90% of the population, I know first hand that some trades even make more than their unionized counterparts in my area.
It would being better pay, better benefits, even more stable careers and better work-life balance.
It doesn’t matter how much money you’re already making, or how good your benefits already are. If you have a Union, you can negotiate for improvements. There is always room for improvement, unless you’re working at a fully-mutual workers cooperative.
I know first hand that some trades even make more than their unionized counterparts
I’d be interested to learn more, do you have a source or anything?
I already negotiate. Every couple years I interview around, I get a job offer, I take it back it my employer and they either match it or I leave. I’ve personally increased my salary 6x since I’ve joined the industry about a decade ago, I know people who have increased it more. I don’t know anyone in a unionized field who’s managed to achieved anything like this. I don’t know that it’s impossible, just seems to be much more rare. I’m a specialized individual in a specialized industry, I already have bargaining power and I definitely reject that my compensation, benefits, job stability, and WLB would be better if I had been unionized this whole time.
I’d be interested to learn more, do you have a source or anything?
Like I said, first hand. Purely anecdotal, I’m sure it isn’t the case for all union jobs.
This does suck though. To start, a counter-offer-based model begs discrimination. You should be getting yearly raises commensurate with (at absolute bare minimum, not even necessarily accounting for inflation) the increase in productivity from year to year.
This is to say nothing of work environments. Unions could reduce or end crunch. Not just as hard blockers, but mandating the kind of project management that doesn’t require crunch.
There’s also a history of wage suppression.
https://www.inc.com/jeremy-quittner/silicon-valley-wage-collusion-class-action.html
They’ll only get better at it, especially as the market continues to turn and companies continue to consolidate.
I’m not in games, but if/when things start to turn, it’s far easier for myself and the people around me to just leave for an employer that treats us right than to try to unionize and force the current one to behave. Those are the benefits of having a job that’s very much in demand though, not to mention one that can be worked from home and isn’t dependent on geography, so the union isn’t necessary because the employees already hold enough power. If the employer has a monopoly on your jobs, being able to unionize is a powerful tool in your toolbelt.
Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean others are not being mistreated
FTFY
without unions there could be a huge salary disparity between devs in the same role, in the same company, even in the same project. I’ve personally witnessed more than 2x, heard about even more.Sometimes it’s more than justified with individual’s performance and impact, sometimes it’s not. Some people are just better skill-wise, some people are better at applying pressure on their employer, holding business-critical knowledge hostage or simply negotiating.
Point here is - while unionizing might make things better on average, there would be a very real pushback from people who are benefitting from current system and this is not necessarily management. For management in some cases it would be even a net benefit, since they don’t have to deal with primadonnas and someone tying things to themselves just for leverage.
*Devs working in Poland. Unions in Europe are per profession or economic sector not per company.
Unions don’t work the same way in all european countries.
In France, the union I belong to is organized by local company and public service, with a spawling system of dual cascading federations by geographic sector and economic sector.
And there are several competing national union organizations which overlap. I don’t know exactly how the other ones are organized
This is the difference between a trade union and an industrial union. You can join an industrial union elsewhere in Europe or even in the US, such as the IWW.
And Epic Games announced a big layoff coming soon. I dunno what’s happening in the industry rn, but it’s not looking good
Silicon Valley Bank imploded, taking the easy money away from them.
That was just part of it. The entire tech sector massively retracted after the boom it saw during COVID, which is also responsible for the sudden enshittification of so many different products/services all at once.
Yup. They can’t take out interest-free loans to pay off their almost-interest-free loans. So now they’re scrambling to save money and build value the old fashioned way.
People with lots of money want even more money. Less employees means less money that has to be paid out which means more money in the short term. Makes line go up for a while. Makes suits happy.
The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:
The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).
This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.
This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.
So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.
The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.
Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.
Good for them! My union did massively right by me so far and as far as I am aware there have been zero downsides.
For workers, unions are 100% upside.
YES. MORE.
