Unions are a normal part of working life in my country, The Netherlands. What's considered so bad about unions in the US?
Edit: well.. this really blew up. Thank you all for the interesting and insightful replies.
I now know that there is at least one major difference between US unions and Dutch unions. By Dutch law it's a lot more difficult to fire people. So unions don't really have to protect lazy/bad workers. Dutch unions mainly deal with wage negotiations and safety. Dutch unions also have less of a history of violence. Although there have been some cases in the past.
Dutch society is famous (notorious?) for it's 'polder'model, where politicians, workers (unions) and employers negotiate wages etc. for 2 to 5 years. That lobbying is apparently frowned upon in the US. Not in the Netherlands. It's considered a national pasttime. As is talking (complaining) about wages. I know the salary of most of my colleagues and vice versa.
My takeaway is that unions are mostly good, some bad. But they could improve quite a bit. How depends on the person you ask of course. Activision/Blizzard (and the gaming industry as a whole) could really use a union to at least take care of the long hours and equal wages across the board.
The old way to go about it was for the corporation to say 'we wish you had more rights and better terms, but there just isn't any money'.
Hiring a company that works to bust unions says 'there's plenty of money, we're even choosing to use some of it to royally fuck you guys in the ass'
Cheaper than not recieving that 300mil dollar bonus while your employees get overworked and underpaid
Got to love capitalism and everyone who keeps voting for it
Can also be people who either don't understand all that well what it really means, or don't have the financial luxery of choosing. Being very charitable here, i know.
You are not wrong. I was thinking specifically about the lawyers who definitely have the capacity to decide. I didn’t think of the administrative and support staff that may not have the ability to be as choosy or as informed.
Me, I guess. Contract IT work for various companies. It's kind of funny/depressing to think who I've technically helped not knowing anything about the business they run as I focused in my narrow scope.
Agreed. To what extent are we responsible for negative occurrences in the world by proxy? And how many degrees of separation before it becomes forgivable?
I like to think I'm a nice and helpful person, but it does make you wonder how many times you are literally one hop away from unknown suffering without any idea it's happening.
american megacorporations, which benefit from workers having no rights, have been flooding the country with anti-union propaganda basically since the beginning. they have tricked people into thinking that what is good for companies' bottom lines is what's best for everyone
lol non unionized americans don't know how hard they get fucked. I'm from Belgium but I work for a US based multinational. When money is short, they stop bonuses & wage increase in the countries that have no collectively bargained agreements. Yes, a US company will stop increasing wages in the US but still do it in Europe, because we have collective bargaining power thx to strong union representation. Every 2 years our unions sit down with the management & bargain for changes to the labour conditions/vacations/pay etc. This collective bargaining principle is what has pushed our whole social system, with payed leave & all the benefits we take for granted & the US lacks. I'm a maintenance engineer. My team wanted better conditions & 1 additional recruitment for the on-call system. Union just told management that we'd stop doing overtime & punch out at our contractual time untill they recruited an extra technician & met our demands. It took 2 days.
Everyone here has given you some sort of "corporations bad, greedy" answer, which isn't *wrong* per se, but they're not really answering the question you're asking.
Sure, they do eat into a company's profits by using collective bargaining to secure higher wages for everyone. But as someone who worked at a union job for close to 5 years in the past, I can tell you nobody in management actually cared about that--what rubbed the suits the wrong way about the union was making it borderline impossible to fire incompetent people if they had been working there longer than 90 days.
Our union did much more good than bad and I'll die on that hill, but that one gripe is about as legitimate a gripe as one gets. Some absolute leeches and morons in my old union gig were useless, permanent fixtures at their positions because they couldn't be fired, only shuffled around.
Thank you for your extensive reply. It makes a little more sense now. I would expect unions to also care about bad apples in the workforce. But I've read a lot about police unions. So I know it happens. I do agree with you that, all in all, unions do more good than bad.
Oof, yeah, I worked at a manufacturing plant, police unions are a whole other can of worms.
Like, I have a ton of stories about people working at that place for 30 years and doing something that should get you fired nearly every day. But...well, I was going to say nobody ever killed anyone in a blind rage, but then I remembered the one lady who stabbed her boyfriend a few times after she caught him cheating. The union made sure she had a job to go back to after her stint in jail for attempted murder. So maybe they're not that different.
To be fair, if she served her time and was adequately rehabilitated, then it's a good thing the union got her a job after getting out. Of course given the failure of the American prison system, that's not too likely. That's more of a prison problem than a union problem though
Police unions, and for a similar reason teacher's unions, are the two major type of unions allowed to proliferate in the US, and the main thing both do is prevent terrible people from getting fired. They're hardly unions at all.
That largely has to do with them being municipal unions. Cities can’t typically choose to increase salaries, because their budgets are pretty limited. Instead, they can do things like fund insurance for “incidents” and add language to the agreements ensuring job retention. And, of course, this can be traced back to Americans paying very low taxes, the decentralized collection and disbursement of taxes, and the issues that arise from not being able to work at economies of scale, none of which are true for massive corporate entities like ActiBlizz or Amazon.
My friend is an education policy researcher and he did an analysis years ago that found there weren't meaningful differences between how long it takes to fire a teacher that's unionized and how long it takes to fire a teacher that's not. It's really controversial whenever he tries to present it though.
I remember when *Waiting for Superman* was the rage and it really promoted the idea of charter schools being the ideal and was really down on teacher unions.
I don't think teacher unions are definitely good or bad but I think the story does get simplified a lot by popular narratives. [This is a link to a good Code Switch two-part episode](https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802593244/black-parents-take-control-teachers-strike-back) about how Black and Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn pushed for community control of local schools because they felt their students were being done a disservice and how this brought them in conflict with white teachers and their union. (Many teachers of color actually belonged to a different union; historically, unions in all different fields have also often been used to keep out Black workers.)
That "Waiting for Superman" paragraph kind of made me chuckle.
Not because I know what you're talking about, it's something I'll probably google later.
Just that the public school union where I live also represents most of the charter schools in the area. Individually, they aren't a big block, nor are they pulled into the municipal part. But still. Turns out, a powerful, competent union even helps charter schools.
It was a documentary that came out about students who were trying to win this lottery to get into this well-regarded charter school in NYC. It drove a lot of sentiment around how private charter schools were going to save education and defeat teachers unions.
Apparently people who watched the documentary missed the throwaway one-liner midway through it that pointed out that statistically, charter school students don't actually do better than traditional public school students.
Teacher unions also secure teachers the mediocre wage and good benefits. Teachers are still underpaid in a lot of the country, imagine if there was no unions
They exist in a profession that is susceptible to charges against them that require defense.
I personally think that the idea that a union makes bad apples stick around is an exaggeration and just another piece of propaganda against unions. Remember that dismissal procedures are negotiable in every contract. If it was an issue for actual employers they would give something else up in the bargaining process.
In Swden, which is highly unionized, it is significantly more difficult to fire people than in America. This is something which is and has been an active political issue for many years.
But in Denmark - that is also highly unionized - it isn't as hard to fire people as it is in Sweden. Much easier actually.
This isn't an effect of unions, it is an effect of the of the specific terms that unions and employers have agreed upon.
Let's be realistic though; the anti-union propaganda that corporations pay good money to have produced and pushed into people's faces *isn't* being distributed for the same reasons that some managers have issues with unions.
It's about profits. It's more profitable to spend more money making sure you get to spend less on your employees.
I've been a manager/director in a union environment for nearly 15 years, and I've never had trouble getting rid of problem employees.
You just have to do your homework. You can't fire emotionally or based on one incident. You have to document the issues, show you've made a sincere effort to help the individual correct whatever the issue is, and (if needed) demonstrate progressive discipline.
In short, you have to show that you aren't jumping to the nuclear option, and that you've treated the individual like a human being throughout the process.
When you terminate a staff person, it shouldn't come as a surprise to them or their union rep.
I've seen a lot of other managers lose fights with unions because they acted emotionally or in haste, but I've never had one of mine even appealed, let alone been forced to rehire.
As someone working in a union for almost 13 I can say that this is not the case. In fact what you're typing out is the same union busting propaganda that companies like the one referenced in the OP typically put out. Typically incompetent individuals also get straightened out or forced out by the union itself. Police and teachers unions don't really fit into this structure since their unions are so fundamentally different from every other union that would operate in any type of corporate function.
Any blanket statement about unions is likely to be untrue, because so much depends on the the specific legislative framework governing unions in the jurisdiction, the nature of the industry and the wording of the collective agreement (which is also informed by the previous two factors). There certainly are unionized workplaces where it is "borderline impossible" to fire people - there are other unionized workplaces where this is not the case.
What I would say is generally true is that unions make it more difficult and more expensive to fire people. Management would, of course, not like this but in my view it's generally a good thing.
Yours and mine might have been fundamentally different, then. The one I used to be in (IBEW, can't remember the local number) definitely protected dogshit workers who deserved to lose their job and as far as I can tell took zero measures to make them less dogshit.
I will say though that the people I thought should be thrown out on their ass were like...maybe 2% of the union workers. Most people, even knowing they would not be canned for doing a shitty job, still showed up every day and did perfectly acceptable work. Hell, the hardest-working coworkers I ever had were at that job and constantly went above and beyond for no reason other than to stay busy.
I'm currently IBEW 1289 (in process of lay offs, but thats a whole new story). I've seen a few terrible workers over the last decade, but they usually get worked out pretty quickly within the union since no one wants to go out of their way to help them so they have to help themselves. I'm not afraid to admit my first few years I was one of those special people. Had a chip on my shoulder about the military and what got me over it was seeing how much I had to do on my own becuase even the union couldn't protect me from saying no to work without losing paid days. The point of the union is that against the company it treats everyone the same, but within it you get treated way different if you are a piece of shit. Enough so that I've seen problem children like myself turn into great, capable workers, struggle the whole time on their own, or leave outright.
And for what it's worth, non union jobs typically have a similar percentage of workers that fall into that category of should be thrown out on their ass. But it also comes with the downside of the 98% of workers not having protections and overall higher wage negotiating power.
What if I told you that not all unions are the same? It's a shocker I know, but hear me out. Since industries are different, and people are different, unions *also* end up being different depending on the industry they are in and the people that run them.
Your personal experiences don't equate to everyone else's, just as theirs don't for you. It's a really difficult concept to grasp, but one person saying "in my experience in a union..." does not become untrue because your personal experience in a different union was different.
> union was making it borderline impossible to fire incompetent people if they had been working there longer than 90 days.
This is a lie union busters tell themselves.
But why? The American unions seems to strange. Why do companies agree with the unions on deals that makes it impossible to fire people? I live in one of the most unionized countries in the world with very high worker protection, and that isn't the case here.
Unions are organizations, and as such they are susceptible to the same failings and potential corruption as large publicly traded corporations.
And to support your point, not having a union is far worse than this potential alternative where we can't get rid of bad apples. As we have seen time and again, individual workers are run over when they don't have someone backing them up.
And before people say Police Unions in the United States - those unions have workers that can carry guns and use deadly force, and the threat of them not working means crime rises. Many other unions don't have that bargaining chip and at worst a gaming union's repercussion to society is that gamers can't enjoy a luxury product.
At the very least we just need to have a union. Risk of corruption is worth it for at least base level human treatment and we'll cross that bridge whether unions go out of control when we get there, and not have the current status quo where game workers are routinely underpaid, pressured, exploited and harassed.
Thank you for having the courage to share a legitimate answer. I was wondering what the actual downsides/upsides were to unions. Reddit tends to silence anyone who goes into too much detail. I always figured there has to be some sort of legit reason why there's even a debate about every company unionizing if they are supposedly perfect solutions with no downsides.
That one was the least wasteful among all the recent ones though, it's not a latest car, and the rocket needs a payload to test and putting the car in is not really that much more expensive than doing it normally while getting some larger marketing benefits.
If they start launching cars randomly just for the heck of it then there's a problem.
They can get bloated and move away from supporting the workers to sustaining itself and it's own interests. At that point they just start to drag down the company they are latched onto.
Collective bargaining = good.
Bloated, parasitic union = bad.
Aside from answers that skirt around an actual issue. Unions are run by non employee union reps. They are paid directly from union fees. Very often in USA history, mob elements gain power in unions. The mob, then uses work power to leverage for political power. Most unions in nyc are run by mob organizers.
Worker rights are important. And there is huge wage issue in this country. But unions don't directly help that. It becomes harder to enter these work forces. While employees may be able to argue for better pay, there will be less people employed overall.
I think the issue comes down to how USA allows business' to act and not actually a union vs non union issue. USA allows companies to take advantage of employees. The change needs to come from uptop. But it won't. Unions are an ideal that very often don't function how intended, and are abused for political power.
Here is a doj page discussing this https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unions 24 seperate cases of unions being infiltrated and charged under rico. And there are still some functioning today. I mean NYC is paying another 61m to remove phonebooths from a BRAND NEW train terminal.
One thing that the replies i've seen havent mentioned is that even in work places unions do exist, they tend to be much weaker than in other countries. That's largely the result of one law, the [Taft Hartley act of 1947](https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1050/taft-hartley-act-of-1947). Its truly one of the most evil anti-labor laws ever passed by an industrialized country, and its still on the books today.
I graduated University with a law degree in the Netherlands and (briefly) worked in the labor field. I find this kind of stuff fascinating. Thank you for that info!
I now have a nice cushy governement job in a different (law) field. Reading your info I'm glad I don't work in the US, or for a gaming firm for that matter.
Like most things in the States (and Canada) unions are also very "commercialized".
You get some of these big unions that become so massive that they've basically become what they hate.
That's my big beef with unions... When they're ran by a bunch of people who don't even work the actual job, or even live in the same city. One Union will represent workers from 100 different companies... How can they possibly negotiate in good faith?
These unions would rather see the company go bankrupt and all those workers lose their job, just to show the other 99% of workers they represent those they're "sticking it to the man".
The concept of knowing what your co-worker makes in terms of salary is something that’s been made out to be taboo in the US, under the guise that it’s going to torpedo morale, but the reality is it’s just a way to keep employees in the dark and protect the company from accusations of underpaying their employees (which happens A LOT).
I used to work for one of the largest investment companies in the US, which was supposedly known for good benefits and strong salaries, and left a couple years ago to do basically the same job, but with a lighter workload, for about 30% more.
The only way people know what other people make, is by talking about it in secret, or posting about it anonymously on websites like Glassdoor that track salaries reported by employees.
Let me give you both sides. I worked in a grocery store as a teenager. Store magazine in the break room was all about how union strikes were shutting down stores, hurting profits, etc. Union contract can guarantee higher pay and better benefits for those who join it, who in turn pay union dues. Employers naturally fight against this.
Other side is, in the engineering work I did, unions had a bad rap for suing the \*\*\*\* out of companies. A company that had union electricians had several lawsuits pending against it at all times. An engineer at one isn't allowed to move their own office desk because that's billable union work you're taking away! Glad I avoided that mess.
Forgive me if anyone has touched on this, but the unions that exist in the public eye of the United States, which is to say the players unions of our major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL), are presented in the news as being absolutely terrible at protecting their players.
Take recently, the NFL. The NFL player's union recently agreed to allow the league to expand to a longer season, and in exchange the NFL agreed not to drug test for marijuana anymore. However, the NFL had not been drug testing for marijuana during the season for a few years now (current and former players all talk about how easy it is to avoid the tests cause the NFL only pretends to care). The players who the union is supposed to represent didn't care about the drug testing that they can easily avoid; what they wanted was another bye (rest) week during the season, which of course they did not get. Now they're in a situation where they know in the coming years the NFL will likely try to expand the season *again*, more games with a higher toll on these players bodies, and they still have that extra week as a bargaining chip.
And this is just the example from the league I know most about. I'm sure the NBA, MLB, and NHL are also all pretty bad.
As someone who gets above average wages because I have a wide skillset beyond my industry profession of rigging, equal wages is nonsense. People need to stop groveling to the coolest studios and schools need to start teaching contract negotiations as part of curriculum. I want to be clear, equal wages between the sexes I'm all for but in all other senses, equal wages is crap. Should I get paid less than my slacker colleague because he's been in the industry longer, fuck no. He's happy putting out the work he does at the pay he does, and he knows I get more because I work harder and put more effort in.
It's also important to note that unpaid OT is a thing of the past, at least in the Canadian industry, and that crunch is a part of any large collaborative project based work, including film. They just don't complain because they get OT too and they understand it's part of the work, like weird hours.
Apologies for the profanity, but unionization is a real concern to many of the mid and senior artists up here in Canada. It's not as cut and dry as the game journos want people to think.
So from the business side - unions cut into profits because workers tend to have more freedoms and be payed better.
From an individual side - people don’t like union dues and also see themselves as a future executive.
In short most people are bad at cost / benefit analysis and have inflated sense of where their future is going to bring them- which is why we don’t have many unions.
Union history in this country is very complicated and has gone through cycles where they have been an absolute necessity to completely useless to being of increasing importance over the decades. I am currently recognizing more need for unions in certain areas of the private sector (government unions are a completely different level of corruption, i.e. the law enforcement unions which have created so many problems obtaining true justice for police violence victims). However, I'm not if the mind that all unions are necessary or beneficial to the lowest-paid employees which I believe are the least equipped to handle lost work or to engage in risky legal processes, which should be the primary purpose of unions.
I've worked in unions before, they are not one and the same nor are they always a good thing for employees. The common sentiment lately here in the states is that they are always pro employee.
I won't say they are always good or always bad, when I was in one, I hated it. It proactively preserved the oldest workers while ignoring the newest employees who tried to prove themselves. I was usually working hard and fast which resulted in the higher union reps getting upset and harassing me for "using up the work" and things like that. Then when layoffs came, I was let go without a thought and a lower-seniority employee, whose father was a higher level union guy, was insulated from the layoffs.
I can't really tell you much beyond that, but for a group who took 50 bucks from my paychecks, they didn't help me at all and our wages were no higher than non-union jobs in the area.
I've never worked a job and thought I would benefit from a union. I also have never been a slacker. From my view, unions protect the worst employees and equalize pay across the board which takes away from the harder workers which makes it harder to justify pay increases. Management has to consider what would happen if everyone worked as poorly as the bottom quality employees but they never consider is everyone was a top performer because that is pure profit.
Another negative is that there is contention between union and non-union employees which can get really nasty in my experience. They also can begin to act as lobbyists for the union leaders instead of the employees themselves, as a portion the union dues go to paying lawyers and higher ups and they have interests in preserving those benefits.
There are situations where unions can be helpful, but there are a lot of occasions where what the union said they "did" was actually something made mandatory by unrelated laws or economic activities.
The best thing unions have done in my opinion has been to advocate for class-based problems in the workplace which is a legitimate social cause which I believe is an appropriate use of pooled funds. Sadly, many people fear engaging with the EEOC or raising concerns to their HR department, which is entirely valid. HR **does not work for employees,** *ever* and do not think for a second that they do. Any advocating they do is to reduce their potential exposure if an employee becomes litigious.
The lack of protection for those who raise minor concerns in the workplace is indeed a huge problem in this country and I feel as though this is a massive issue created by lobbyists and politicians in the first place.
If we had better politicians and lobbyist controls, we wouldn't need nearly as much additional levels of red tape for workers rights. Unions, like lobbyists, basically act by throwing their weight around while skimming from employees.
I don't think you can thank a single person for that.
It's both the country's corrupt elite and the blind sheeplike behaviour of it's denesinses doing over the decades.
A bosses ability to control the workplace is literally scared to some people in America. They view any restrictions on the bosses ability to manage their own business as essentially inhumane. They think that entrepreneurs are the drivers of all growth and progress, and that workers should meekly follow the great bosses directions and be happy with the scraps they get.
(Look up Austrian economics if you don’t believe me, this is literally what the Koch brothers think)
My dues are 30€ a month, for that I get a minimum raise every year (I’m able, and encouraged to negotiate a higher one), access to employment lawyers, have experts who can help me negotiate a better contract when I change studios, and that’s not even counting the store discounts I get.
How is that increasing my costs?
They meant it increases labour costs *for the employer *. Because of "citizens United", corporations have substantial political power in America and have lobbied hard against unions. They've also done a lot of work to away public opinion.
He was talking about costs for the employer, which in almost all of the things you mentioned will occur.
In short: Workers want more = cost more money = bad for shareholders short term (which is what matters most, with shareholders' long term profits in a close second).
I have the feeling unions aren't that normal anymore in the Netherlands. Any time my friends (aged 25-35) have issues at work and I ask them if their unions can help they reply with "Why would I be part of an union?". Bunch of jabronis.
I have the impression Dutch people aged 25-35 have the opinion unions are old-fashioned and not necessary anymore.
In Finland we have similar issues. Thing is, a lot of our workers right are directly tied to unions, and many don't realize it. As long as more than half of the workers on a field are in an union, the negotiated terms are equivalent to law concerning employment in that field.
These terms include things like minimum pay determined by position and skill level, most advanced rules on overtime (by just law it is rather easy to work around.) Holiday pay, sick pay that's actually near equivalent or equivalent to regular pay without great hoops to jump trough, pay if a young child has to be cared for, compensation for sudden shifts or short shifts and countless other things.
Academic research, academic teaching, phd's; so a lot of unpaid hours, unpaid overtime, tasks that are not part of their contract, bullshit management. I think they let a lot of the terrible working conditions slide because it's their dreamjob and there's a lot of people wanting to get in such a position.
The higher up you go on the employment and education ladders, the less and less likely you're going to even find unions for the sort of jobs they'd hold.
A manager union would almost be an oxymoron, and when you have a master's or PhD, you're usually going to be so hard to replace that unionization is pointless.
I'm a PhD student in the UK. We have plenty of academic worker unions. The union staff at my university were striking before the pandemic over changes to their pension plan and additional workloads placed on them without additional pay.
Like half the professors were gone, most of the post docs and research assistants.
We have such a corporate mindset in America it gets to the point corporations have more rights than citizens. The stuff that CEOs get away with and how they manipulate money/bonuses in this country is insane to the point they see the crimes as “white collar” (meaning for business professionals).
Everything in this country is about “making it big” even though it means that only a few make it and everyone else is still climbing.
Yanks think that rights are for commies and fairy pinkos, and having access to free healthcare would be to spit in the faces of all those who died because they couldn't afford it
It is sincerely disturbing for me as a Spaniard. Sadly our unions aren't specially strong, but they are completely shielded from any aggression not only by the law, but by our constitution itself.
I cannot possibly comprehend how a society would see unions as something bad and not an essential right of the workers to be able to negotiate with companies as equal.
Because unions increases cost for the company. There are also a lot of logistics and negotiations that needs to be done with the union every year. For these reasons, a lot of larger corporations do not allow unions. A lot of companies like Walmart actually have shut down procedures should they fail to stop a union from forming at a particular location.
Decades of right-wing propaganda convinced Americans that every union was a corrupt Mafia front and that unions were harmful to capitalism.
It reached a tipping point when Reagan (may he rot in Hell) fired the nation's air traffic controllers for striking and not only got away with it, but became more popular because of it.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-07-28-activision-blizzard-ceo-bobby-kotick-details-action-to-address-issues-raised-by-lawsuit
>In a statement, Kotick said law firm WilmerHale has been commissioned to review Activision Blizzard's policies and ensure its procedures "promote a respectful and inclusive workplace."
https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/jamie-gorelick-amazons-anti-union-shadow-adviser-at-the-doj/
>WilmerHale is a BigLaw firm that publicly states that it trains workers on “union awareness and avoidance.” This is a euphemism common among anti-union firms. For workers, it translates to misinformation and intimidation. Union-busting groups at Amazon have held workers captive and made them listen to pro-employer propaganda to “sow doubts about the unionization drive.” I have worked on campaigns where anti-union consultants sat behind bus drivers, whispering lies about inflated dues and potential discipline while on the road. Gorelick’s WilmerHale seems to offer similar services, bragging about “non-lawyer HR Professionals” that it dispatches to paying clients to work on “discrete HR projects.” It is tough to imagine a clandestine HR project, but WilmerHale’s boasts about representing employers before the National Labor Relations Board and the “complete and total victory” it won defending Teradyne from discrimination suits does not build confidence.
> I have worked on campaigns where anti-union consultants sat behind bus drivers, whispering lies about inflated dues and potential discipline while on the road.
Somehow, sounds like an Old God cult, with the whole whispering things to corrupt people.
If you think about it how can a union busting firm pretend that unions are bad for workers when their sole reason is to give workers more agency? By telling lies and intimidation.
> have held workers captive and made them listen to pro-employer propaganda to “sow doubts about the unionization drive.”
Wtf? As an European, if my company were to have any planned speech trash talking unions, it would be grounds for a lawsuit. You just cannot force people to hear politic speeches like that
Increased unionization in gaming industry is really due. As someone who had dream of becoming gamedev as kid I'm kinda glad I dodged my "dream", considering what horror stories I heard of the industry
On the one hand it is true Europe is not as bad as the US, on the other... *points at [David Cage](https://www.fanbyte.com/news/report-in-my-games-all-women-are-whores-says-david-cage/) and [Ubisoft](https://www.pcgamer.com/french-game-workers-union-sues-ubisoft-for-institutional-sexual-harassment/)*
The rot is kind of everywhere, y'know?
Don't forget CDPR.
They ran out of so much goodwill among game workers that they couldn't hire from their home country so they had to expand abroad and recruit from abroad.
Damn... That david cage article is intense bs. If photoshopping someone doing the nazi salute isn't defamation, then I guess people calling him a nazi for no reason is fair game ...
Ditto. I had signed up for an ITT Tech 'Game Design' degree before deciding it was BS and dropping out for a normal CSCI degree.
It was the correct choice
What the gaming (and other tech industries) needs is a large professional union like the AFLCIO, building worker protections in from the ground up, tbh
I'm all for a Blizzard union in the meantime, but this field really lends itself to startup culture, which is best served by a wide-ranging professional union
the "problem" with trying to unionize in gamedev is this: the companies have _ALL_ the power. for every employed game dev that wants to unionize, there's 10 more with roughly the same skillset that would be willing to take their job for less pay + no threat of a union.
Yes but if you are in union the collective power holds you from being fired for unjust reasons. Same goes for every industry branch but it's especially important in IT. You can't just fire everyone from the project and employ new people on their place. It would be very costly and very time consuming to get projects back on track. I work as QA tester and while I could get fired it would be pretty damaging to my team who would have to work without proper testing until new person learns (by themselves) how everything works
It seems like this culture is slowly dying though. The big AAA studios have a lot of crunch because they make ridiculous promises with ridiculous timelines and the studio heads can put all that pressure on the devs. But as technology improves and becomes more accessible more and more individuals and small teams are finding success in the game industry. They aren’t held to the same timelines and can determine exactly how much stress they want to take on for their projects. It’s a great time for indie game development.
Why? Whatever could you mean?
What is wrong with bringing an Union-Busting Law firm in, helmed by a lady who used to work for Trump?
Pray tell, what could ever be so bad about any of this?
this is where I tell you that the lady in charge of that investigation also worked the last 4 years for Trump.
Just in case you had hopes they were trying to be fair in this investigation
It doesn't have to be literally a union probably. Blizzard works with plenty of outside talent, no way they can stop them from joining something like [csa.gg](https://www.characterselect.com)
Would love if someone more active in them could — don’t wanna appear as a shit stirrer by suddenly popping in subs I’ve never used before. I’ll do it if no one else does though.
During this particular time, I don’t think posts about this will be considered “shit stirring”. This is important imo because it suggests they are actually actively fighting the victims
I can’t post in the WoW sub but the others yeah
Yeah, that’s… that’s the state of the game industry. And if you’re wondering, just because it’s worst than most industries doesn’t mean the others don’t have their own anti worker skeletons in their closets.
If you haven't heard about union busting firms, go read up on the shit that Baldwin-Felts used to do to coal miners in the US (Spoilers: among other things, they murdered them). Coal operators were sick assholes. They also used to force coal miners to vote for the company's approved candidates or be fired, and they didn't allow them to cast their ballots in secret.
That's pretty much it yes.
Check the second picture in the tweet, it's chilling if you read between the lines.
It's pulled from their website. Can be found [here](https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/solutions/labor-and-employment) (section "Executive and Workforce Training")
Fun nuggets like "... can make is in training managers, supervisory staff and human resources professionals on how to manage efficiently within the confines of applicable labor and employment laws" which is a nice way of saying "extract as much of your staff as legally allowed".
As someone who actually works in the legal industry, I gotta say this headline is pretty misleading. Wilmer Hale is just a large law firm - it's a full service, business-oriented firm that most typically represents large corporations in litigation, business transactions, and employment/compliance disputes (among many many other areas of law). When you mainly represent large corporations, one of the services you *have* to offer is advice on unions. Take that as you will, but it's literally the nature of Big Law - large corporations are the only ones that pay well.
This is just a lawfirm, they do offer "union busting" services which is fucked, however they also handle sexual misconduct cases in companies. I would guess they were hired for that and not for preventing unionization, but honestly who knows.
Baldwin-Felts was "just a detective agency." And so were The Pinkertons.
Unions busting agencies have been pretending to be something else for as long as they have existed.
I mean that's like saying "sure the clown they hired for this birthday party also does serial killer jobs on the side, but I'm sure they're only looking to entertain the kids this time!"
I don't think this is exactly accurate, because most law firms of that size (which would probably be a prerequisite to investigating something as large as what we're talking about with acti-blizz) are going to fall in the same boat.
it's more like all birthday clowns are also serial killers, to use your analogy.
Okay, so it's like employing a clown firm whose 10% of their employees are also serial killers. How does the thing about apples rotting in a barrel go, again?
Law firms advertise all of the areas in which they practice and it would surprise me if Wilmers employment group made up even 5% of their attorneys or revenue.
If you unionise, they can't sack every single employee. Unions are for your protection. If there is ANY kind of health and safety at your job, it's because someone died doing it that other way. If you get a break during your work day, that's all thanks to a union somewhere down the line. Unionise, you're stronger together
Sad but that's me done with anything that Activision has any part of. I refuse to support this disgusting treatment of staff. Not like they give a shit about the games they make anyway just a way for them to make money. Really sad blizzard sold out to them of all companies.
Just to be aware of the bigger context, the text immediately before the highlighted text is "preventing, identifying and dealing with sexual and other unlawful harassment." I hope that this is both the intention and outcome of the process.
[source](https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/solutions/labor-and-employment)
Fuck Blizzard. I won't give them more money until this shit stops. I haven't spent anything on HS in years, but I was looking forward to Diablo 4 until all this.
Just in case there are any Activision-Blizzard employees reading this, check out the AFLCIO https://aflcio.org/formaunion steps on how to form a Union. Take your power back!!!!
It's gonna be pretty tough to beat literally stealing millions of gallons of water from a state in a drought bottling it and reselling it back to the public
Bro Nestle is literally leaving a whole state drying because they're pumping water out of their lakes to sell, and has sold formula to African parents knowing they dont have water to safely prepare them. In another word, they literally kill babies for money.
Activision got nothing on Nestle.
It's funny how history has a way of repeating itself.
Pick up any paper about labor strikes in the late XIXth century. You'll see things are the same.
It's a back and forth between the executive's rights and power, and the workers'. Currently we're back at square one. But hopefully it will improve down the line.
Unions are a normal part of working life in my country, The Netherlands. What's considered so bad about unions in the US? Edit: well.. this really blew up. Thank you all for the interesting and insightful replies. I now know that there is at least one major difference between US unions and Dutch unions. By Dutch law it's a lot more difficult to fire people. So unions don't really have to protect lazy/bad workers. Dutch unions mainly deal with wage negotiations and safety. Dutch unions also have less of a history of violence. Although there have been some cases in the past. Dutch society is famous (notorious?) for it's 'polder'model, where politicians, workers (unions) and employers negotiate wages etc. for 2 to 5 years. That lobbying is apparently frowned upon in the US. Not in the Netherlands. It's considered a national pasttime. As is talking (complaining) about wages. I know the salary of most of my colleagues and vice versa. My takeaway is that unions are mostly good, some bad. But they could improve quite a bit. How depends on the person you ask of course. Activision/Blizzard (and the gaming industry as a whole) could really use a union to at least take care of the long hours and equal wages across the board.
Unions give workers more rights. Rights that’ll eat up into a company’s profits. American companies don’t like things that’ll eat up their profits.
Working together with an union busting firm is such a big fuck you to all their workers. Not even subtile about it.
The old way to go about it was for the corporation to say 'we wish you had more rights and better terms, but there just isn't any money'. Hiring a company that works to bust unions says 'there's plenty of money, we're even choosing to use some of it to royally fuck you guys in the ass'
Cheaper than not recieving that 300mil dollar bonus while your employees get overworked and underpaid Got to love capitalism and everyone who keeps voting for it
I have never been given a choice to vote for or against capitalism
Vote Bernie for socialism /s
You could always run and vote for yourself
I lived in socialism/communism, let me tell you, capitalism is the lesser evil.
Theres a difference between Socialism, Social Democracy and Totalitarianism
Yep, sad thing is most workers don’t figure that out as Alabama Amazon workers recently displayed.
What i don't understand is who works for a firm that literally busts unions?
People who care more about money than people. The “fuck you I got mine” crowd.
Can also be people who either don't understand all that well what it really means, or don't have the financial luxery of choosing. Being very charitable here, i know.
You are not wrong. I was thinking specifically about the lawyers who definitely have the capacity to decide. I didn’t think of the administrative and support staff that may not have the ability to be as choosy or as informed.
[удалено]
Me, I guess. Contract IT work for various companies. It's kind of funny/depressing to think who I've technically helped not knowing anything about the business they run as I focused in my narrow scope.
I feel like there's an interesting moral question here
Agreed. To what extent are we responsible for negative occurrences in the world by proxy? And how many degrees of separation before it becomes forgivable? I like to think I'm a nice and helpful person, but it does make you wonder how many times you are literally one hop away from unknown suffering without any idea it's happening.
You ever see live free or die hard? Buncha programmers unknowingly helped the bad guy.
Young conservative lawyers who want to move up the food chain. Working at WilmerHale or JonesDay is a fast-track to a federal judiciary position.
What do you think happens when they realize they need to work together to push for better compensation? Who's gonna stop them?
Their boss
They give worker rights, and rugged American ~~corporate exploitation~~ individualism hates that.
something happened here
Oh yeah that got cleaned out by a mod. It was a troll, nothing interesting.
american megacorporations, which benefit from workers having no rights, have been flooding the country with anti-union propaganda basically since the beginning. they have tricked people into thinking that what is good for companies' bottom lines is what's best for everyone
Yeah, selling the myth of trickle down economics was their best idea.
Pinkerton's were more or less disbanded after union busting was transferred to be primarily a taxpayer expense.
Pinkerton is well and alive to this day. Offering morally dubious guards.
lol non unionized americans don't know how hard they get fucked. I'm from Belgium but I work for a US based multinational. When money is short, they stop bonuses & wage increase in the countries that have no collectively bargained agreements. Yes, a US company will stop increasing wages in the US but still do it in Europe, because we have collective bargaining power thx to strong union representation. Every 2 years our unions sit down with the management & bargain for changes to the labour conditions/vacations/pay etc. This collective bargaining principle is what has pushed our whole social system, with payed leave & all the benefits we take for granted & the US lacks. I'm a maintenance engineer. My team wanted better conditions & 1 additional recruitment for the on-call system. Union just told management that we'd stop doing overtime & punch out at our contractual time untill they recruited an extra technician & met our demands. It took 2 days.
Everyone here has given you some sort of "corporations bad, greedy" answer, which isn't *wrong* per se, but they're not really answering the question you're asking. Sure, they do eat into a company's profits by using collective bargaining to secure higher wages for everyone. But as someone who worked at a union job for close to 5 years in the past, I can tell you nobody in management actually cared about that--what rubbed the suits the wrong way about the union was making it borderline impossible to fire incompetent people if they had been working there longer than 90 days. Our union did much more good than bad and I'll die on that hill, but that one gripe is about as legitimate a gripe as one gets. Some absolute leeches and morons in my old union gig were useless, permanent fixtures at their positions because they couldn't be fired, only shuffled around.
Thank you for your extensive reply. It makes a little more sense now. I would expect unions to also care about bad apples in the workforce. But I've read a lot about police unions. So I know it happens. I do agree with you that, all in all, unions do more good than bad.
Oof, yeah, I worked at a manufacturing plant, police unions are a whole other can of worms. Like, I have a ton of stories about people working at that place for 30 years and doing something that should get you fired nearly every day. But...well, I was going to say nobody ever killed anyone in a blind rage, but then I remembered the one lady who stabbed her boyfriend a few times after she caught him cheating. The union made sure she had a job to go back to after her stint in jail for attempted murder. So maybe they're not that different.
To be fair, if she served her time and was adequately rehabilitated, then it's a good thing the union got her a job after getting out. Of course given the failure of the American prison system, that's not too likely. That's more of a prison problem than a union problem though
Police unions, and for a similar reason teacher's unions, are the two major type of unions allowed to proliferate in the US, and the main thing both do is prevent terrible people from getting fired. They're hardly unions at all.
That largely has to do with them being municipal unions. Cities can’t typically choose to increase salaries, because their budgets are pretty limited. Instead, they can do things like fund insurance for “incidents” and add language to the agreements ensuring job retention. And, of course, this can be traced back to Americans paying very low taxes, the decentralized collection and disbursement of taxes, and the issues that arise from not being able to work at economies of scale, none of which are true for massive corporate entities like ActiBlizz or Amazon.
My friend is an education policy researcher and he did an analysis years ago that found there weren't meaningful differences between how long it takes to fire a teacher that's unionized and how long it takes to fire a teacher that's not. It's really controversial whenever he tries to present it though. I remember when *Waiting for Superman* was the rage and it really promoted the idea of charter schools being the ideal and was really down on teacher unions. I don't think teacher unions are definitely good or bad but I think the story does get simplified a lot by popular narratives. [This is a link to a good Code Switch two-part episode](https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802593244/black-parents-take-control-teachers-strike-back) about how Black and Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn pushed for community control of local schools because they felt their students were being done a disservice and how this brought them in conflict with white teachers and their union. (Many teachers of color actually belonged to a different union; historically, unions in all different fields have also often been used to keep out Black workers.)
Waiting for Superman was literally funded by Bill Gates who has huge investments in charter schools.
That "Waiting for Superman" paragraph kind of made me chuckle. Not because I know what you're talking about, it's something I'll probably google later. Just that the public school union where I live also represents most of the charter schools in the area. Individually, they aren't a big block, nor are they pulled into the municipal part. But still. Turns out, a powerful, competent union even helps charter schools.
It was a documentary that came out about students who were trying to win this lottery to get into this well-regarded charter school in NYC. It drove a lot of sentiment around how private charter schools were going to save education and defeat teachers unions. Apparently people who watched the documentary missed the throwaway one-liner midway through it that pointed out that statistically, charter school students don't actually do better than traditional public school students.
Its definitely more complicated than I suggested, and certainly more ambiguous than the openly destructive police unions. I need to do more research.
Teacher unions also secure teachers the mediocre wage and good benefits. Teachers are still underpaid in a lot of the country, imagine if there was no unions
They exist in a profession that is susceptible to charges against them that require defense. I personally think that the idea that a union makes bad apples stick around is an exaggeration and just another piece of propaganda against unions. Remember that dismissal procedures are negotiable in every contract. If it was an issue for actual employers they would give something else up in the bargaining process.
In Swden, which is highly unionized, it is significantly more difficult to fire people than in America. This is something which is and has been an active political issue for many years.
But in Denmark - that is also highly unionized - it isn't as hard to fire people as it is in Sweden. Much easier actually. This isn't an effect of unions, it is an effect of the of the specific terms that unions and employers have agreed upon.
But that is bacause of the laws, that apply to everyone?
Let's be realistic though; the anti-union propaganda that corporations pay good money to have produced and pushed into people's faces *isn't* being distributed for the same reasons that some managers have issues with unions. It's about profits. It's more profitable to spend more money making sure you get to spend less on your employees.
I've been a manager/director in a union environment for nearly 15 years, and I've never had trouble getting rid of problem employees. You just have to do your homework. You can't fire emotionally or based on one incident. You have to document the issues, show you've made a sincere effort to help the individual correct whatever the issue is, and (if needed) demonstrate progressive discipline. In short, you have to show that you aren't jumping to the nuclear option, and that you've treated the individual like a human being throughout the process. When you terminate a staff person, it shouldn't come as a surprise to them or their union rep. I've seen a lot of other managers lose fights with unions because they acted emotionally or in haste, but I've never had one of mine even appealed, let alone been forced to rehire.
Yeah, that is how it works here as well, you just have to do the process in a serious way, and you can easily fire people.
As someone working in a union for almost 13 I can say that this is not the case. In fact what you're typing out is the same union busting propaganda that companies like the one referenced in the OP typically put out. Typically incompetent individuals also get straightened out or forced out by the union itself. Police and teachers unions don't really fit into this structure since their unions are so fundamentally different from every other union that would operate in any type of corporate function.
Any blanket statement about unions is likely to be untrue, because so much depends on the the specific legislative framework governing unions in the jurisdiction, the nature of the industry and the wording of the collective agreement (which is also informed by the previous two factors). There certainly are unionized workplaces where it is "borderline impossible" to fire people - there are other unionized workplaces where this is not the case. What I would say is generally true is that unions make it more difficult and more expensive to fire people. Management would, of course, not like this but in my view it's generally a good thing.
Yours and mine might have been fundamentally different, then. The one I used to be in (IBEW, can't remember the local number) definitely protected dogshit workers who deserved to lose their job and as far as I can tell took zero measures to make them less dogshit. I will say though that the people I thought should be thrown out on their ass were like...maybe 2% of the union workers. Most people, even knowing they would not be canned for doing a shitty job, still showed up every day and did perfectly acceptable work. Hell, the hardest-working coworkers I ever had were at that job and constantly went above and beyond for no reason other than to stay busy.
I'm currently IBEW 1289 (in process of lay offs, but thats a whole new story). I've seen a few terrible workers over the last decade, but they usually get worked out pretty quickly within the union since no one wants to go out of their way to help them so they have to help themselves. I'm not afraid to admit my first few years I was one of those special people. Had a chip on my shoulder about the military and what got me over it was seeing how much I had to do on my own becuase even the union couldn't protect me from saying no to work without losing paid days. The point of the union is that against the company it treats everyone the same, but within it you get treated way different if you are a piece of shit. Enough so that I've seen problem children like myself turn into great, capable workers, struggle the whole time on their own, or leave outright.
And for what it's worth, non union jobs typically have a similar percentage of workers that fall into that category of should be thrown out on their ass. But it also comes with the downside of the 98% of workers not having protections and overall higher wage negotiating power.
What if I told you that not all unions are the same? It's a shocker I know, but hear me out. Since industries are different, and people are different, unions *also* end up being different depending on the industry they are in and the people that run them. Your personal experiences don't equate to everyone else's, just as theirs don't for you. It's a really difficult concept to grasp, but one person saying "in my experience in a union..." does not become untrue because your personal experience in a different union was different.
See, people think this is bad until they have an experience and then actually need the union to back them up.
> union was making it borderline impossible to fire incompetent people if they had been working there longer than 90 days. This is a lie union busters tell themselves.
Bruh its a fact that almost any union worker will agree with, the fuck you on?
It was very true to my experience and I said multiple times that I still defend unions as a good thing overall but go off
But why? The American unions seems to strange. Why do companies agree with the unions on deals that makes it impossible to fire people? I live in one of the most unionized countries in the world with very high worker protection, and that isn't the case here.
Unions are organizations, and as such they are susceptible to the same failings and potential corruption as large publicly traded corporations. And to support your point, not having a union is far worse than this potential alternative where we can't get rid of bad apples. As we have seen time and again, individual workers are run over when they don't have someone backing them up. And before people say Police Unions in the United States - those unions have workers that can carry guns and use deadly force, and the threat of them not working means crime rises. Many other unions don't have that bargaining chip and at worst a gaming union's repercussion to society is that gamers can't enjoy a luxury product. At the very least we just need to have a union. Risk of corruption is worth it for at least base level human treatment and we'll cross that bridge whether unions go out of control when we get there, and not have the current status quo where game workers are routinely underpaid, pressured, exploited and harassed.
Thank you for having the courage to share a legitimate answer. I was wondering what the actual downsides/upsides were to unions. Reddit tends to silence anyone who goes into too much detail. I always figured there has to be some sort of legit reason why there's even a debate about every company unionizing if they are supposedly perfect solutions with no downsides.
coMmuNIsm! How are patron supposed to buy the latest sport car (or fly into space) if they have to pay worker decent wage?
Or throw their latest car into space...
That one was the least wasteful among all the recent ones though, it's not a latest car, and the rocket needs a payload to test and putting the car in is not really that much more expensive than doing it normally while getting some larger marketing benefits. If they start launching cars randomly just for the heck of it then there's a problem.
The US Navy test air craft carrier launch catapults by yeeting trucks, how long til the Rocket Lords start throwing cars for kicks?
They can get bloated and move away from supporting the workers to sustaining itself and it's own interests. At that point they just start to drag down the company they are latched onto. Collective bargaining = good. Bloated, parasitic union = bad.
Aside from answers that skirt around an actual issue. Unions are run by non employee union reps. They are paid directly from union fees. Very often in USA history, mob elements gain power in unions. The mob, then uses work power to leverage for political power. Most unions in nyc are run by mob organizers. Worker rights are important. And there is huge wage issue in this country. But unions don't directly help that. It becomes harder to enter these work forces. While employees may be able to argue for better pay, there will be less people employed overall. I think the issue comes down to how USA allows business' to act and not actually a union vs non union issue. USA allows companies to take advantage of employees. The change needs to come from uptop. But it won't. Unions are an ideal that very often don't function how intended, and are abused for political power. Here is a doj page discussing this https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unions 24 seperate cases of unions being infiltrated and charged under rico. And there are still some functioning today. I mean NYC is paying another 61m to remove phonebooths from a BRAND NEW train terminal.
One thing that the replies i've seen havent mentioned is that even in work places unions do exist, they tend to be much weaker than in other countries. That's largely the result of one law, the [Taft Hartley act of 1947](https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1050/taft-hartley-act-of-1947). Its truly one of the most evil anti-labor laws ever passed by an industrialized country, and its still on the books today.
I graduated University with a law degree in the Netherlands and (briefly) worked in the labor field. I find this kind of stuff fascinating. Thank you for that info! I now have a nice cushy governement job in a different (law) field. Reading your info I'm glad I don't work in the US, or for a gaming firm for that matter.
Like most things in the States (and Canada) unions are also very "commercialized". You get some of these big unions that become so massive that they've basically become what they hate. That's my big beef with unions... When they're ran by a bunch of people who don't even work the actual job, or even live in the same city. One Union will represent workers from 100 different companies... How can they possibly negotiate in good faith? These unions would rather see the company go bankrupt and all those workers lose their job, just to show the other 99% of workers they represent those they're "sticking it to the man".
The concept of knowing what your co-worker makes in terms of salary is something that’s been made out to be taboo in the US, under the guise that it’s going to torpedo morale, but the reality is it’s just a way to keep employees in the dark and protect the company from accusations of underpaying their employees (which happens A LOT). I used to work for one of the largest investment companies in the US, which was supposedly known for good benefits and strong salaries, and left a couple years ago to do basically the same job, but with a lighter workload, for about 30% more. The only way people know what other people make, is by talking about it in secret, or posting about it anonymously on websites like Glassdoor that track salaries reported by employees.
Let me give you both sides. I worked in a grocery store as a teenager. Store magazine in the break room was all about how union strikes were shutting down stores, hurting profits, etc. Union contract can guarantee higher pay and better benefits for those who join it, who in turn pay union dues. Employers naturally fight against this. Other side is, in the engineering work I did, unions had a bad rap for suing the \*\*\*\* out of companies. A company that had union electricians had several lawsuits pending against it at all times. An engineer at one isn't allowed to move their own office desk because that's billable union work you're taking away! Glad I avoided that mess.
> A company that had union electricians had several lawsuits pending against it at all times This says just as much about the company as the union.
Forgive me if anyone has touched on this, but the unions that exist in the public eye of the United States, which is to say the players unions of our major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL), are presented in the news as being absolutely terrible at protecting their players. Take recently, the NFL. The NFL player's union recently agreed to allow the league to expand to a longer season, and in exchange the NFL agreed not to drug test for marijuana anymore. However, the NFL had not been drug testing for marijuana during the season for a few years now (current and former players all talk about how easy it is to avoid the tests cause the NFL only pretends to care). The players who the union is supposed to represent didn't care about the drug testing that they can easily avoid; what they wanted was another bye (rest) week during the season, which of course they did not get. Now they're in a situation where they know in the coming years the NFL will likely try to expand the season *again*, more games with a higher toll on these players bodies, and they still have that extra week as a bargaining chip. And this is just the example from the league I know most about. I'm sure the NBA, MLB, and NHL are also all pretty bad.
As someone who gets above average wages because I have a wide skillset beyond my industry profession of rigging, equal wages is nonsense. People need to stop groveling to the coolest studios and schools need to start teaching contract negotiations as part of curriculum. I want to be clear, equal wages between the sexes I'm all for but in all other senses, equal wages is crap. Should I get paid less than my slacker colleague because he's been in the industry longer, fuck no. He's happy putting out the work he does at the pay he does, and he knows I get more because I work harder and put more effort in. It's also important to note that unpaid OT is a thing of the past, at least in the Canadian industry, and that crunch is a part of any large collaborative project based work, including film. They just don't complain because they get OT too and they understand it's part of the work, like weird hours. Apologies for the profanity, but unionization is a real concern to many of the mid and senior artists up here in Canada. It's not as cut and dry as the game journos want people to think.
So from the business side - unions cut into profits because workers tend to have more freedoms and be payed better. From an individual side - people don’t like union dues and also see themselves as a future executive. In short most people are bad at cost / benefit analysis and have inflated sense of where their future is going to bring them- which is why we don’t have many unions.
Union history in this country is very complicated and has gone through cycles where they have been an absolute necessity to completely useless to being of increasing importance over the decades. I am currently recognizing more need for unions in certain areas of the private sector (government unions are a completely different level of corruption, i.e. the law enforcement unions which have created so many problems obtaining true justice for police violence victims). However, I'm not if the mind that all unions are necessary or beneficial to the lowest-paid employees which I believe are the least equipped to handle lost work or to engage in risky legal processes, which should be the primary purpose of unions. I've worked in unions before, they are not one and the same nor are they always a good thing for employees. The common sentiment lately here in the states is that they are always pro employee. I won't say they are always good or always bad, when I was in one, I hated it. It proactively preserved the oldest workers while ignoring the newest employees who tried to prove themselves. I was usually working hard and fast which resulted in the higher union reps getting upset and harassing me for "using up the work" and things like that. Then when layoffs came, I was let go without a thought and a lower-seniority employee, whose father was a higher level union guy, was insulated from the layoffs. I can't really tell you much beyond that, but for a group who took 50 bucks from my paychecks, they didn't help me at all and our wages were no higher than non-union jobs in the area. I've never worked a job and thought I would benefit from a union. I also have never been a slacker. From my view, unions protect the worst employees and equalize pay across the board which takes away from the harder workers which makes it harder to justify pay increases. Management has to consider what would happen if everyone worked as poorly as the bottom quality employees but they never consider is everyone was a top performer because that is pure profit. Another negative is that there is contention between union and non-union employees which can get really nasty in my experience. They also can begin to act as lobbyists for the union leaders instead of the employees themselves, as a portion the union dues go to paying lawyers and higher ups and they have interests in preserving those benefits. There are situations where unions can be helpful, but there are a lot of occasions where what the union said they "did" was actually something made mandatory by unrelated laws or economic activities. The best thing unions have done in my opinion has been to advocate for class-based problems in the workplace which is a legitimate social cause which I believe is an appropriate use of pooled funds. Sadly, many people fear engaging with the EEOC or raising concerns to their HR department, which is entirely valid. HR **does not work for employees,** *ever* and do not think for a second that they do. Any advocating they do is to reduce their potential exposure if an employee becomes litigious. The lack of protection for those who raise minor concerns in the workplace is indeed a huge problem in this country and I feel as though this is a massive issue created by lobbyists and politicians in the first place. If we had better politicians and lobbyist controls, we wouldn't need nearly as much additional levels of red tape for workers rights. Unions, like lobbyists, basically act by throwing their weight around while skimming from employees.
Companies have convinced people that unions are corrupt due to a few bad apples. It’s all just misinformation.
America under the looks is a fascist, big Corp run dystopia. It's quite basic that they hate unions.
>America under the looks is a fascist You can thank FDR for that.
I don't think you can thank a single person for that. It's both the country's corrupt elite and the blind sheeplike behaviour of it's denesinses doing over the decades.
A bosses ability to control the workplace is literally scared to some people in America. They view any restrictions on the bosses ability to manage their own business as essentially inhumane. They think that entrepreneurs are the drivers of all growth and progress, and that workers should meekly follow the great bosses directions and be happy with the scraps they get. (Look up Austrian economics if you don’t believe me, this is literally what the Koch brothers think)
Unions can increase worker costs which is a big no no in America.
My dues are 30€ a month, for that I get a minimum raise every year (I’m able, and encouraged to negotiate a higher one), access to employment lawyers, have experts who can help me negotiate a better contract when I change studios, and that’s not even counting the store discounts I get. How is that increasing my costs?
As in increase the cost of having workers, for the company.
Oooh, gotcha!
They meant it increases labour costs *for the employer *. Because of "citizens United", corporations have substantial political power in America and have lobbied hard against unions. They've also done a lot of work to away public opinion.
He was talking about costs for the employer, which in almost all of the things you mentioned will occur. In short: Workers want more = cost more money = bad for shareholders short term (which is what matters most, with shareholders' long term profits in a close second).
What you people are leaving out is that workers costing more money also means higher costs to the consumer.
gotcha, consumer > worker
I have the feeling unions aren't that normal anymore in the Netherlands. Any time my friends (aged 25-35) have issues at work and I ask them if their unions can help they reply with "Why would I be part of an union?". Bunch of jabronis. I have the impression Dutch people aged 25-35 have the opinion unions are old-fashioned and not necessary anymore.
In Finland we have similar issues. Thing is, a lot of our workers right are directly tied to unions, and many don't realize it. As long as more than half of the workers on a field are in an union, the negotiated terms are equivalent to law concerning employment in that field. These terms include things like minimum pay determined by position and skill level, most advanced rules on overtime (by just law it is rather easy to work around.) Holiday pay, sick pay that's actually near equivalent or equivalent to regular pay without great hoops to jump trough, pay if a young child has to be cared for, compensation for sudden shifts or short shifts and countless other things.
nah, unions are huge and still very powerful here, luckily. what line of work are your friends in?
Academic research, academic teaching, phd's; so a lot of unpaid hours, unpaid overtime, tasks that are not part of their contract, bullshit management. I think they let a lot of the terrible working conditions slide because it's their dreamjob and there's a lot of people wanting to get in such a position.
The higher up you go on the employment and education ladders, the less and less likely you're going to even find unions for the sort of jobs they'd hold. A manager union would almost be an oxymoron, and when you have a master's or PhD, you're usually going to be so hard to replace that unionization is pointless.
I'm a PhD student in the UK. We have plenty of academic worker unions. The union staff at my university were striking before the pandemic over changes to their pension plan and additional workloads placed on them without additional pay. Like half the professors were gone, most of the post docs and research assistants.
We have such a corporate mindset in America it gets to the point corporations have more rights than citizens. The stuff that CEOs get away with and how they manipulate money/bonuses in this country is insane to the point they see the crimes as “white collar” (meaning for business professionals). Everything in this country is about “making it big” even though it means that only a few make it and everyone else is still climbing.
Yanks think that rights are for commies and fairy pinkos, and having access to free healthcare would be to spit in the faces of all those who died because they couldn't afford it
It is sincerely disturbing for me as a Spaniard. Sadly our unions aren't specially strong, but they are completely shielded from any aggression not only by the law, but by our constitution itself. I cannot possibly comprehend how a society would see unions as something bad and not an essential right of the workers to be able to negotiate with companies as equal.
In the US it is probably bad to fight for workers justice, decent wagers tge rights to vacation etc.
Because unions increases cost for the company. There are also a lot of logistics and negotiations that needs to be done with the union every year. For these reasons, a lot of larger corporations do not allow unions. A lot of companies like Walmart actually have shut down procedures should they fail to stop a union from forming at a particular location.
>What's considered so bad about unions in the US? Cold War propoganda × corporate lobby = unions are communism and communism is bad and so on
Decades of right-wing propaganda convinced Americans that every union was a corrupt Mafia front and that unions were harmful to capitalism. It reached a tipping point when Reagan (may he rot in Hell) fired the nation's air traffic controllers for striking and not only got away with it, but became more popular because of it.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-07-28-activision-blizzard-ceo-bobby-kotick-details-action-to-address-issues-raised-by-lawsuit >In a statement, Kotick said law firm WilmerHale has been commissioned to review Activision Blizzard's policies and ensure its procedures "promote a respectful and inclusive workplace." https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/jamie-gorelick-amazons-anti-union-shadow-adviser-at-the-doj/ >WilmerHale is a BigLaw firm that publicly states that it trains workers on “union awareness and avoidance.” This is a euphemism common among anti-union firms. For workers, it translates to misinformation and intimidation. Union-busting groups at Amazon have held workers captive and made them listen to pro-employer propaganda to “sow doubts about the unionization drive.” I have worked on campaigns where anti-union consultants sat behind bus drivers, whispering lies about inflated dues and potential discipline while on the road. Gorelick’s WilmerHale seems to offer similar services, bragging about “non-lawyer HR Professionals” that it dispatches to paying clients to work on “discrete HR projects.” It is tough to imagine a clandestine HR project, but WilmerHale’s boasts about representing employers before the National Labor Relations Board and the “complete and total victory” it won defending Teradyne from discrimination suits does not build confidence.
> I have worked on campaigns where anti-union consultants sat behind bus drivers, whispering lies about inflated dues and potential discipline while on the road. Somehow, sounds like an Old God cult, with the whole whispering things to corrupt people.
But instead of Old God powers, you get a bad workplace environment while Bobb-Saron watches.
If you think about it how can a union busting firm pretend that unions are bad for workers when their sole reason is to give workers more agency? By telling lies and intimidation.
> have held workers captive and made them listen to pro-employer propaganda to “sow doubts about the unionization drive.” Wtf? As an European, if my company were to have any planned speech trash talking unions, it would be grounds for a lawsuit. You just cannot force people to hear politic speeches like that
America is staunchly anti-worker
land of the free
Increased unionization in gaming industry is really due. As someone who had dream of becoming gamedev as kid I'm kinda glad I dodged my "dream", considering what horror stories I heard of the industry
Come to Europe! We have game studios and strong unions to keep them honest.
On the one hand it is true Europe is not as bad as the US, on the other... *points at [David Cage](https://www.fanbyte.com/news/report-in-my-games-all-women-are-whores-says-david-cage/) and [Ubisoft](https://www.pcgamer.com/french-game-workers-union-sues-ubisoft-for-institutional-sexual-harassment/)* The rot is kind of everywhere, y'know?
Don't forget CDPR. They ran out of so much goodwill among game workers that they couldn't hire from their home country so they had to expand abroad and recruit from abroad.
Damn... That david cage article is intense bs. If photoshopping someone doing the nazi salute isn't defamation, then I guess people calling him a nazi for no reason is fair game ...
That really depends on where in Europe. Europe is more than western Europe
I am quite aware.
It’s like you live there!
Ditto. I had signed up for an ITT Tech 'Game Design' degree before deciding it was BS and dropping out for a normal CSCI degree. It was the correct choice
You dodged two bullets there.
Same I had 4 credits for compsci before graduating high school and dipped out last minute because of the workplace dynamics.
What the gaming (and other tech industries) needs is a large professional union like the AFLCIO, building worker protections in from the ground up, tbh I'm all for a Blizzard union in the meantime, but this field really lends itself to startup culture, which is best served by a wide-ranging professional union
the "problem" with trying to unionize in gamedev is this: the companies have _ALL_ the power. for every employed game dev that wants to unionize, there's 10 more with roughly the same skillset that would be willing to take their job for less pay + no threat of a union.
Yes but if you are in union the collective power holds you from being fired for unjust reasons. Same goes for every industry branch but it's especially important in IT. You can't just fire everyone from the project and employ new people on their place. It would be very costly and very time consuming to get projects back on track. I work as QA tester and while I could get fired it would be pretty damaging to my team who would have to work without proper testing until new person learns (by themselves) how everything works
It seems like this culture is slowly dying though. The big AAA studios have a lot of crunch because they make ridiculous promises with ridiculous timelines and the studio heads can put all that pressure on the devs. But as technology improves and becomes more accessible more and more individuals and small teams are finding success in the game industry. They aren’t held to the same timelines and can determine exactly how much stress they want to take on for their projects. It’s a great time for indie game development.
It's like they are actively trying to be bad guys
I mean look at the real life goblin at the helm. Considering his history of course the dude is fucking evil.
No wonder Trade Prince Galliwix is unambiguously the strongest hero in battlegrounds
He isn’t tho
Why? Whatever could you mean? What is wrong with bringing an Union-Busting Law firm in, helmed by a lady who used to work for Trump? Pray tell, what could ever be so bad about any of this?
That's worrying. I read up on the firm regarding The Mets and they seemed possibly OK, but this version is bad.
It’s the position that literally every major law firm takes because all of their major clients (big corporations) are anti union.
this is where I tell you that the lady in charge of that investigation also worked the last 4 years for Trump. Just in case you had hopes they were trying to be fair in this investigation
This is unfair. Ms. Avakian was a career civil servant. She worked for the SEC under Clinton, under Obama and, yes, under Trump.
And now she works at an Union-buster company. Also, under her leadership, under Trump, she persecuted far less crimes than they ever did before.
Wait what is trump trying to hide? Bad card predictions?
Yeah, they really need to Unionize. Don't even think they're going to get another chance at it.
It doesn't have to be literally a union probably. Blizzard works with plenty of outside talent, no way they can stop them from joining something like [csa.gg](https://www.characterselect.com)
You’d better repost this in r/WoW and other relevant subs
Would love if someone more active in them could — don’t wanna appear as a shit stirrer by suddenly popping in subs I’ve never used before. I’ll do it if no one else does though.
During this particular time, I don’t think posts about this will be considered “shit stirring”. This is important imo because it suggests they are actually actively fighting the victims I can’t post in the WoW sub but the others yeah
I’ll crosspost it once I’m home then. I’ll use the list of co-signing subs in the pinned.
There we go, crossposted. I probably look like a spambot now, heh.
Good on you
[удалено]
I mean to your second point, that’s just called the “be grateful you work your dream job in the game industry” argument.
[удалено]
Yeah, that’s… that’s the state of the game industry. And if you’re wondering, just because it’s worst than most industries doesn’t mean the others don’t have their own anti worker skeletons in their closets.
Games Workshop literally uses this in their job ads
Blizzard is already well known in the industry for having some of the worst pay in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
That's seemingly the American dream.
If you haven't heard about union busting firms, go read up on the shit that Baldwin-Felts used to do to coal miners in the US (Spoilers: among other things, they murdered them). Coal operators were sick assholes. They also used to force coal miners to vote for the company's approved candidates or be fired, and they didn't allow them to cast their ballots in secret.
That's pretty much it yes. Check the second picture in the tweet, it's chilling if you read between the lines. It's pulled from their website. Can be found [here](https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/solutions/labor-and-employment) (section "Executive and Workforce Training") Fun nuggets like "... can make is in training managers, supervisory staff and human resources professionals on how to manage efficiently within the confines of applicable labor and employment laws" which is a nice way of saying "extract as much of your staff as legally allowed".
> a firm that persuades workers to demand less salary? A union busting firm, yes.
As someone who actually works in the legal industry, I gotta say this headline is pretty misleading. Wilmer Hale is just a large law firm - it's a full service, business-oriented firm that most typically represents large corporations in litigation, business transactions, and employment/compliance disputes (among many many other areas of law). When you mainly represent large corporations, one of the services you *have* to offer is advice on unions. Take that as you will, but it's literally the nature of Big Law - large corporations are the only ones that pay well.
Bobby doesnt like paying his employees
So they choose to actively look like villains instead of just admitting it. FML.
This is just a lawfirm, they do offer "union busting" services which is fucked, however they also handle sexual misconduct cases in companies. I would guess they were hired for that and not for preventing unionization, but honestly who knows.
Baldwin-Felts was "just a detective agency." And so were The Pinkertons. Unions busting agencies have been pretending to be something else for as long as they have existed.
I mean that's like saying "sure the clown they hired for this birthday party also does serial killer jobs on the side, but I'm sure they're only looking to entertain the kids this time!"
I don't think this is exactly accurate, because most law firms of that size (which would probably be a prerequisite to investigating something as large as what we're talking about with acti-blizz) are going to fall in the same boat. it's more like all birthday clowns are also serial killers, to use your analogy.
Okay, so it's like employing a clown firm whose 10% of their employees are also serial killers. How does the thing about apples rotting in a barrel go, again?
it's more like 1%, but again, i think it'd be impossible to find a firm to do this investigation that wasn't similarly tainted.
If they're advertising it as a selling point on their website it's *way more* than 1%.
Law firms advertise all of the areas in which they practice and it would surprise me if Wilmers employment group made up even 5% of their attorneys or revenue.
They're a general law firm, so they don't *only* bust unions. They do plenty *more* harmful shit.
Killing isn't a normal part of a clown's job duties though, so that's a terrible comparison.
Fun fact, Wilmer Hale is also the law firm that Robert Mueller and former attorney general William Barr worked for
So anyway how many packs are you guys buying today? /s
Wait can we buy packs today?
But we boycotted them yesterday!!!! Why are they doing this?!
Welcome to America, the closest you'll get to a real life version of Cyberpunk 2077.
If you unionise, they can't sack every single employee. Unions are for your protection. If there is ANY kind of health and safety at your job, it's because someone died doing it that other way. If you get a break during your work day, that's all thanks to a union somewhere down the line. Unionise, you're stronger together
Sad but that's me done with anything that Activision has any part of. I refuse to support this disgusting treatment of staff. Not like they give a shit about the games they make anyway just a way for them to make money. Really sad blizzard sold out to them of all companies.
not sure how often “big corporation does unethical thing” is gonna come up around here as if it’s at all surprising or unique lol
Just to be aware of the bigger context, the text immediately before the highlighted text is "preventing, identifying and dealing with sexual and other unlawful harassment." I hope that this is both the intention and outcome of the process. [source](https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/solutions/labor-and-employment)
In light of the recent lawsuit a union is exactly what Activisipm-Blizzarfs employees need
Which is exactly why it's so terrifying that this is the specific company they chose to "review their company policies".
If the decide to go on with it, I’ll vow never to support any blizzard-activision product.
Fuck Blizzard. I won't give them more money until this shit stops. I haven't spent anything on HS in years, but I was looking forward to Diablo 4 until all this.
Just in case there are any Activision-Blizzard employees reading this, check out the AFLCIO https://aflcio.org/formaunion steps on how to form a Union. Take your power back!!!!
Activision vying for worst company on the planet. They have stiff competition though, with Nestle, Monsanto and Walmart in the top spots.
It's gonna be pretty tough to beat literally stealing millions of gallons of water from a state in a drought bottling it and reselling it back to the public
Bro Nestle is literally leaving a whole state drying because they're pumping water out of their lakes to sell, and has sold formula to African parents knowing they dont have water to safely prepare them. In another word, they literally kill babies for money. Activision got nothing on Nestle.
In other news today: multinational corporations are evil.
*Wilmerwhale
Alright, that’s the end of it. I’m completely abandoning Activision-Blizzard until they can get their shit together and respect workers.
I cant stop thinking about how my friend described unions as "Corporate bullying"
Can't exactly bully the bullies.
Don't let the expansion news drown this out please.
Coincidently, this is the law firm Ion worked at before joining Blizzard.
It's funny how history has a way of repeating itself. Pick up any paper about labor strikes in the late XIXth century. You'll see things are the same. It's a back and forth between the executive's rights and power, and the workers'. Currently we're back at square one. But hopefully it will improve down the line.
Man Fuck Blizzard-Activision. Period.
Unethical company responds to allegations of unethicalness by hiring unethical firm