Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union • Hacker News Board

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#231

Post by torginus » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

PacificSpecific wrote: post #124

Animats wrote: post #111

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 ho…

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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#232

Post by kevinh » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #186

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#233

Post by Manuel_D » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

kevinh wrote: post #232

Manuel_D wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#234

Post by ethbr1 » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199

kristofferg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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?

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#235

Post by quesera » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

frmersdog wrote: post #203

echelon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bei…

*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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#236

Post by FrustratedMonky » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #224

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#237

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #222

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 wo…

> 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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#238

Post by Daishiman » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #216

Daishiman wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

> 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.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#239

Post by skybrian » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #62

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

In abstract discussions about hypothetical situations, you can imagine things turning out however you like.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#240

Post by appreciatorBus » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #92

appreciatorBus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.