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Game Workers Unite

gameworkersunite.org

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Re: Game Workers Unite

#141

Post by gnarbarian »

sangnoir wrote: post #119
petee wrote: post #107

One of my relatives works for a large well known game developer; same employer for years. Because they decide to classify many of their devs as contract workers, they are denied rights afforded to 'full-time' employees - when she is laid off for months at a time (to prevent being called a full-time) she can't collect unemployment. No health care, no benefits whatsoever. And due to contracts, can't work for a rival ei…

I'm amazed that this is legal in a first world country- it would be illegal to do this in a couple of third-world countries I'm personally familiar with: the laws state that if you're a on contract for more than a certain number of months, you automatically become a permanent employee. Firing and rehiring for the same position as a contractor is straight-up illegal.

For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break.

The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions.

The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately.

Nobody needs to work 100 hours a week on salary for at a AAA studio who will discard you.

The key message is this:

AAA productions are losing touch with their audiences and spending unholy amounts of money on garbage games. (this is accelerating just like Hollywood).

Unlike the poor actor/actress who has to suck Spacey/Wienstein's dick, YOU have options. Go work a boring 9-5 webapp job with benefits and then hack on a game with a few passionate friends with a vision of something AWESOME.

The Internet levels the playing field for us. Minecraft is an excellent example of this.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#142

Post by lovich »

petre wrote: post #139
lovich wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that's the wrong view. The union is negotiating with the company and saying, work with only union employees or the union leaves en masse. Why would you have the right to just override the unions deal with the company?

Because it's clearly discrimination to only hire union members. Same as only hiring christians.

It's discrimination to only hire people who will take below x$ an hour. You can make the argument that this is a bad type of discrimination and should be controlled, like discriminating against race/gender/age, but the fact that it's discrimination at all is not a strong argument

Re: Game Workers Unite

#143

Post by sangnoir »

gnarbarian wrote: post #141
sangnoir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that this is legal in a first world country- it would be illegal to do this in a couple of third-world countries I'm personally familiar with: the laws state that if you're a on contract for more than a certain number of months, you automatically become a permanent employee. Firing and rehiring for the same position as a contractor is straight-up illegal.

For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break. The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions. The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately. Nobody nee…

> For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break

The game industry is not made up entirely of programmers! There are lots of other roles that do not map to the software industry such as animators, modelers and artists. They can't just switch to making enterprise CRUD apps. Even the programmers might have difficulty meeting the requirement of having 2-4 years experience on framework that got its first stable release in 2017.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#144

Post by gnarbarian »

sangnoir wrote: post #143
gnarbarian wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break. The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions. The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately. Nobody nee…

> For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter-actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break The game industry is not made up entirely of programmers! There are lots of other roles that do not map to the software industry such as animators, modelers and artists. They can't just switch to making enterprise CRUD apps. Even the programmers might have difficulty meeting the require…

And again I will claim that:

"you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately"

If you are capable of learning how to use the apps necessary to be a animator/modeler you DO have the skills to work in another industry! Nobody is entitled to work whatever job they want wherever they want, and nobody forced you to take out loans to get a degree in Art/3d modelling or animation.

For example, I'd love to be a beer taste tester for 150k per year and live in downtown SF, but the demand isn't there. How would a Union of beer taster's improve the lot of people who want the job? They would establish rules to exclude up and comers with more talent who are willing to work for less.

The sad truth is a union will help people in the gaming industry just as much as a union would help the NBA. No matter what there will always be a shortage of jobs compared to the number of people who wish to work there. But the union will exclude a significant portion of people who are willing to work for less from competing at all.

Hint:(Similar to minimum wage, this is where unpaid internships came from)

So either you compete on price/working conditions, Or you end up with a Union cabal who set artificial standards of entry and keep out talented newcomers who are willing to work for less.

You have choice. Make good decisions.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#145

Post by pandaman »

skybrian wrote: post #26
ramy_d wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the way film making unions are organized is something to look into but my impression is that the problem space is more familiar when you look at what industrial worker unions deal with. That is: careers under a single employer instead of gigs where you go from employer to employer and have to basically get re-hired.

Hmm, but why shouldn't games work like a Hollywood-style gig economy, since the need for labor varies depending on a game's lifecycle?

The difference is that a lot of roles in film are individual. You can hire a director, a writer, a scenarist, a bunch of actors etc. separately and they will do their job just fine. And for the tasks, which require high-skill teamwork, movies contract a company, which employs the team full-time (e.g. VFX, stunts).

There are very few individual roles in games. Even leadership roles are highly dependant on their teams (just look at what happened to Visceral if you want an example). And there is a lot of interdisciplinary interaction too, so even if there were separate game programming, game design and game art houses, there is no guarantee their could work with each other in a productive manner. At best you can separate QA and some art teams, which already happens all the time.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#146

Post by hueving »

door3 wrote: post #111
microcolonel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing relative other employees , why would they ha…

Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive. This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive). This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but if I feel like I am not, as an i…

This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers.

You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some people.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#147

Post by horsecaptin »

ttoinou wrote: post #120
horsecaptin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the industry is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor, some type of a union apparatus is the most affective way to ensure fair compensation. Yes, we can educate others who want to enter the industry, but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt, you'll accept the poor working conditions for long enough and the cycle will continue to perpetuate. The best protection against predation is…

is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor You need to think about WHY this situation happens. I'm willing to believe grouped negotiations can bring value to a class of workers but it's a partial remedy to a bad situation. but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt Paying expensive university could be a really bad decision, especially in markets like game industry / software dev, which doe…

That's a good point about unions requiring minimum education levels for membership. I suppose this is where apprenticeships come in. There will still be non-union developers, just as there are non union plumbers.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#148

Post by wonton2 »

humanrebar wrote: post #56
wonton2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use the exactly these arguments for union and against. But in modern justice systems you are innocent until proven guilty, simply so anyone cannot just scream witch and have someone burned.

Getting laid off isn't getting buried, though. Getting a crappy raise isn't going to jail. I do think employees need organization and culture to negotiate better in the short term and manage health and career in the long term. But I don't see evidence that either the employer or the union leadership have the right incentives to meet those needs.

I agree, but the consequence of getting fired for a employee is worse than the consequence for a employer not being able to fire someone. Also a company is more often a organization of several people which can be used to leverage a firing (or what you call it). A union only seeks to counter this by giving each employee a more level playingfield. Without unions and worker laws it is basically a third world country where anyone is at risk of being fired for reasons they dont understand or was never informed of and never given a chance to improve. The importance is in the power balance. It could even be argued that unions are just as important for distributing power and wealth in a society as a democracy. The scandinavian model is by some attributed to the power of the worker unions. Of course anyone working in management and business osners will always oppose unions. But it makes no sense that workers themselves opposes it. Skilled workers will still get work and get better compensated for it.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#149

Post by elihu »

canthonytucci wrote: post #7

Why only game workers? Why not software workers/codewriters in general? I'd prefer something closer to SAG than the auto workers union personally.

I'd guess that unions aren't very effective unless a substantial percentage of the workforce joins, so it makes sense for an organization with limited resources to try to focus on getting wide adoption in a small, specific part of the tech industry rather than trying to get everyone to join all at once.

Maybe the game industry is the best place to start a tech union as a proof-of-concept, given that (if the stereotypes of game studios are true) it has a higher proportion of employees aren't too happy about their relationship with their employer than other parts of the tech industry where the pay and working conditions are better.

Re: Game Workers Unite

#150

Post by realusername »

microcolonel wrote: post #82
canthonytucci wrote: post #7

Why only game workers? Why not software workers/codewriters in general? I'd prefer something closer to SAG than the auto workers union personally.

I would never join or pay into such a union. I'm so happy to be able to make employment agreements freely, and if anyone threatens that, I will criticize them. If developers in the game industry want to take crappy employment agreements because they're infatuated with video games, that is their right. The skillset is portable, and the instability of standard game dev positions is well known, game developers in genera…

You are still free to get a worse contract in the gaming industry without unions, there is nothing preventing you to do that.
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