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United Wizards of the Coast

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Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#171

Post by satvikpendem »

qq66 wrote: post #135
xienze wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all labor that can only be done "here and now." Can't just have Indians do it over the internet. And replacing the workers at a moment's notice is usually complicated by the striking workers harassing and attacking the replacements. Again, hard to do that when your replacement is on the other side of the globe.

You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result. It will be from an entirely different cultural framework.

Hard but not impossible, whereas with something like a longshoremen union, it is literally impossible to move the work elsewhere.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#172

Post by satvikpendem »

michaelt wrote: post #116
bluefirebrand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think on the contrary somewhat If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team

Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them. If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on. As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunit…

Well, the theater and Hollywood workers themselves starve, as seen in the last recent strike, with many not being able to make ends meet.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#173

Post by drusepth »

> Remote Work Protections: Leadership is instituting a mandatory RTO, forcing numerous remote employees across the US to work from a physical office or be forced to resign.

This alone is enough reason for anyone to be up in arms and unionize. Kudos to them for banding together for better working conditions. I hope more big companies follow suit.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#174

Post by none2585 »

kaoD wrote: post #140
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker. If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well). When they are, of course the Worker benefit…

> You have to join the Union, after all Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do. If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?

Some jobs it is mandatory to join the union in America anyway

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#175

Post by charcircuit »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #143
charcircuit wrote: post #136

This is a cancer that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible by firing them all. It is a toxic ideologically that should not be allowed to permeate. >Layoff Protections Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable. >Remote Work Protections Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matt…

> Layoff Protections Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable. > Remote Work Protections Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in m…

>but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate.

At a company like WotC you will get more than 2 weeks of pay worth of severance which is more than the employee equivalent of providing 2 weeks notice. There is also things like WARN in California which require much more than a 2 weeks notice when a doing a layoff.

>Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility.

Except that individual productivity is very often not the bottleneck. The goal should be making the process productive and efficient.

>only enforceable when the media is produced by humans

Hollywood has used AI and other machine produced graphics for special effects for years and that does not prevent the studio from having copyright over the movie.

>stop licking boots

Acknowledging how much value companies bring to both society and investors does not require licking boots or thinking they are a "poor endangered company."

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#176

Post by drusepth »

northern-lights wrote: post #142
bwestergard wrote: post #83

I'm glad to see this. I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize. I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.

This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots. If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bo…

I would wager that a high % of the HN audience are the employers, not the employees.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#177

Post by satvikpendem »

ryandrake wrote: post #149
michaelt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title. That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2] I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones. Fo…

Salary is only one of many workplace issues that organizing can help with. Those US tech people who make $400k, that's great for them! But how is their mental health / burnout? How good is their health insurance? Are they getting enough vacation time or time with their families? Are they regularly expected to work 12+ hour days? Do they have their weekends? Do they want to Work From Home but can't get it? What about…

Generally big tech workers have very cushy jobs with excellent insurance and working conditions with many barely working over 30 hours a week, much less 40. It is why many do not see the benefits of a union because what could a union possibly give them?

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#178

Post by satvikpendem »

ryandrake wrote: post #82
looneysquash wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".) The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically. If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage. Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.…

A lot of HN repliers think that they , out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.

Because generally they can, as software engineers had huge leverage over their employers for the past few decades, so much so that literal parodies like Silicon Valley were made of the cushiness of their jobs. Maybe that is changing now with AI but I doubt it.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#179

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

JRandomHacker42 wrote: post #169
tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there was a huge discussion on what it means amongst judges. On plain reading it does not do what it states it does. Start just with the phrase "its spell" - those words are entirely undefined until getting into the rulings, and don't mean what they mean in other contexts. It makes no mention of the prior rules that it sort of hacks into this either. I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.

I'm a judge and have seen barely any discussion around Prepared (mostly just clarification around the interaction with. Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant. The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.

Ah, I have I guess an old version of the CR downloaded from when I was a judge and TO where rule section 722 is "Controlling Another Player," weird reorganization there.

Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).

Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.

Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#180

Post by satvikpendem »

kaoD wrote: post #140
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker. If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well). When they are, of course the Worker benefit…

> You have to join the Union, after all Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do. If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?

Of course, and that's why some people are opposed to a union, but then others say you're just falling for propaganda or some such nonsense if you deign to have any, even small, criticism of unions.
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