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

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

#251

Post by heavyset_go »

qwe----3 wrote: post #213
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.

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.

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

#252

Post by cogman10 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #237
cogman10 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

#253

Post by AnthonyMouse »

overfeed wrote: post #248
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

> 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…

> 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?

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

#254

Post by Pet_Ant »

desmoulins wrote: post #242
podgorniy wrote: post #20

Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.

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…

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.

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

#255

Post by heavyset_go »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #103
danaris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

> 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…

> 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...

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

#256

Post by tuveson »

an_cap wrote: post #100

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.

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.

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

#257

Post by cogman10 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #228
cogman10 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

> 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 f…

> 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.

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

#258

Post by _DeadFred_ »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #86
overfeed wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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.

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

#259

Post by heavyset_go »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #102
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

#260

Post by _DeadFred_ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #220
vkou wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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

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