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Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

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Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#161

Post by afavour »

itworkslikethat wrote: post #90
afavour wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musicians are generally exploited, too. I don't really see the argument against forming a union just because you enjoy your job. More worker power is a good thing.

Making music is usually not a job. You're making your own intellectual property and sometimes you're successful in selling it. Should we subsidize other kinds of unsuccessful businesses too?

…you realise not everything is a business, right? That things like the arts deserve to exist irrespective of whether they make money?

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#162

Post by advisedwang »

derefr wrote: post #158
advisedwang wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit. > 2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, literally thousands games are released yearly that nobody ever heard of or bought. These are both true of movies, but that is a heavily unionized…

The film industry has a lot of young talent trying to break into the industry, but the industry is mostly composed of older people with better sense of their own worth. The games industry has almost no old talent. There are many non-trivially-sized game studios where nobody working there is over 30. Presumably, on the film-industry side, this is in part a work of the unions, acting as barriers-to-entry to the industr…

Unions create a wage floor and standards of working conditions which eliminates the main benefit of churning though young and optimistic people trying to break into the industry. That's another reason (besides barriers to entry) that unions are responsible for why the film industry has more "old" talent than games.

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#163

Post by factsarelolz »

robertlagrant wrote: post #72
factsarelolz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that don't get a share They wouldn't have those jobs if the players or the league did not exist. That's their share. They make a lively hood off the product's operations.

I agree. Check the comment I'm replying to for more.

Could you link? I reviewed you comment history and don't know which specific reply you're talking about in this thread. Thanks!

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#164

Post by govg »

derefr wrote: post #155
speeder wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to work in the game industry when possible. Unions on the game industry would never work, reason why game industry is so abusive is two fold: 1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit. 2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, l…

Perhaps we need a different revenue model for games. Book publishing was pretty winner-take-all, until Kindle Unlimited (and its close relative, the many serial-fiction "unlock new chapters with coins" websites and apps) came along, and basically changed everything for many indie authors. Before, you needed to woo a publisher, because you needed to be in bookstores, because you needed a certain threshold of word-of-m…

Gamepass is probably a better model in terms of utility to people playing games as well as exposure. Apple is not really a big part of traditional gaming, only has a presence in mobile (which is the biggest segment, but not related to the discussion here).

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#165

Post by PathOfEclipse »

jjj123 wrote: post #152
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reaching into "cosmic justice" territory, which is a really bad place to be. It's not up to you or anyone else to fix the fact that the universe is inherently "unfair" (re: people with different passions, dispositions, and life situations), and certainly giving any entity sufficient power to attempt to solve for cosmic injustice is simply paving a road to tyranny with golden intentions.

Well right now there are existing entities with too much power, unions provide a second (less) powerful entity to balance the unchecked power of corporate leaders. It’s not about correcting a cosmic wrong, it’s about people wanting more power and using a tool to get it.

It really is, though, about correcting cosmic wrongs, because it is the world view you must first hold to believe something "unjust" is occurring when someone voluntarily bargains to work long hours for lower pay to be able to work their dream job. The next step is to pass legislation or push for judicial or executive action to try to "correct" for the injustice. The U.S. already has several very counter-productive pro-union labor laws it has accumulated over the years, and, under democrat presidents like Obama and Biden, the NLRB rules heavily in favor of unions:

https://cei.org/blog/biden-says-he-wants-to-be-the-most-pro-...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/12/adversarial-labor-law...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bidens-pick-for-labor-secreta...

"Biden has already publicly declared he supports changing federal policy so that “there is no Right to Work (laws) allowed anywhere in the country.” President-in-waiting Kamala Harris, likewise, was bitterly critical of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which outlawed mandatory union membership and payment of dues and/or so-called “agency fees” for government employees."

These laws and actions don't make the world more just. On the contrary, they just add new injustices on top of the old ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#166

Post by jraph »

IMTDb wrote: post #77
jraph wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that your decision ? Of course, but that's the whole point. You want to have me? Give me good working conditions! I'm probably not alone. I would not relate these two situations differently. Agriculture or gaming industry, working conditions need to allow comfortable living, dream job or not. I'm not saying anything about unions in my previous comment, but my position is that whether it's a dream job for you…

> You want to have me? Give me good working conditions! I'm probably not alone. At those conditions they also very much might not want to have you. And apparently the total package "industry prestige + working condition + pay" is attractive enough for just the right amount of people that they need. You can argue that it's not a fit for you, but you can't argue that the equilibrium itself that has been reached between…

Note that I was answering to "Doesn't that make it a fair trade?".

I can't argue that things are the way they are (including the equilibrium you are talking about), but that's not I'm trying to do.

"fair" is fairly subjective.

Free market is not necessarily fair (and I don't think it is). That may be part of the reasons why workers are unionizing in the discussed article by the way.

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#167

Post by int_19h »

Manuel_D wrote: post #160
tchaffee wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting that increases in productivity used to be partially shared with the middle class who enjoyed a rising standard of life as a result. Around that time it changed with the rich keeping all those profits to themselves. If middle class salaries had kept up, houses and education would be affordable.

Higher salaries don't solve shortages. If there's 200 buyers for 150 homes, higher salaries would just let those buyer make larger bids. In order to let the poorest 50 people get homes, we need 50 more homes.

There are dozens of vacant homes in US for each homeless person. The national vacancy rate is something like 10%.

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#168

Post by coldpie »

Manuel_D wrote: post #147
coldpie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What else are they going to say in public? Microsoft recognizing the union instead of fighting tooth & nail to destroy it is genuinely novel behavior. They could refuse to recognize the union, or sue to invalidate the ballot, as many, many companies do: "Activision Blizzard did not respond to workers’ request for recognition of a union formed by quality assurance testers at Raven Software" https://www.washingtonpos…

It's all talk until union negotiations actually start. Talk is cheap, increased wages and benefits are not. When Microsoft is met with demands that will actually cost them, we'll see for real whether Microsoft's actions will comport with their words. I'm not optimistic. As other commenters pointed out, this union is limited to QA testers who don't have all that much leverage in the company. The people who do already…

Sure, that's a fair take. But it's still the case that not throwing a massive hissy-fit when employees start talking about unionization is a big departure from how other companies handle it.

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#169

Post by kelseyfrog »

chii wrote: post #96
rainsford wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think of unions as less a new force in the equation you described and more of a labor side equivalent of the collective organizing and action that happens on the company/shareholder side to maximize value. Instead of individual workers all trying to maximize their value in isolation with the company trying to collectively maximize value for all shareholders, unions ideally make it more of a one-to-one balanc…

> only a small drop in shareholder value, for example, that could be considered a net win. only the shareholders can decide if this is worth a drop. And i would imagine the majority of them would not accept a small drop like that.

When shareholders reduce a company to a single metric[shareholder value] the metric becomes meaningless. At that point it doesn't matter.

Re: Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

#170

Post by ryandrake »

phpisthebest wrote: post #121
dmitriid wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no children, I will never have children, and I rarely get sick, and I hate to trave Ah yes. Because it's only people with children who get sick, need time off work, wage protection or pay for overtime, how could I forget. > Has a highly compensated employee that knows their value to the organizations I work for I have never been forced for work overtime with no pay. Me, me, me, I, me, me. I wonder why overti…

>>Me, me, me, I, me, me. You say that like is a bad thing. One should always look out for their own interests. I am unclear why I should not be? >>I wonder why overtime and crazy hours are then the norm across so many industries Well I know many documented cases where it is not "required" but the employee feels it is. As a manager I have had to prevent employees from working too much even though I have told them many…

If you're not interested in vacation or sick leave, a union could also help negotiate things that you do value, like [I'm admittedly guessing here] better 401(k) matching, after-tax 401(k) contributions, an ESOP plan, a profit-sharing plan, a more aggressive bonus structure, and so on. Companies are not just going to offer these kinds of things one-off to those few "Captains of Negotiation" and besides, workers shouldn't have to individually negotiate all these things. Yuck!

Whenever a HN union discussion comes up, the arguments against are always "Unions by definition do these things A, B, and C, which I don't like, and don't do D, E, and F, which I would like." Why do we believe this? Is there some law that says all unions must be the same, do the same kinds of things and have the same good and bad attributes?

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