
Game Workers Unite - smacktoward
https://www.gameworkersunite.org/
======
49531
I am so glad to see this happening!

There are a lot of reasons why game workers need to organize, but it doesn't
have to stop there. Tech workers in general can make the lives of their
teammates a lot better by banding together.

We can also fight for the rights of others, why couldn't Amazon employees
fight for the rights of Amazon's warehouse workers?

Also, things like discrimination and abuse are combated by organized
workforces faster than they are by HR departments, especially when such abuse
comes from managers. No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company
on equal footing. It requires an organization of labor to do that.

~~~
microcolonel
> _No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal
> footing._

Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal
footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole
point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one
person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing
_relative other employees_ , why would they have equal footing if every
employee is inherently different from the next?

~~~
door3
Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive.
This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot
reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have
to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive).
This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but
if I feel like I am not, as an individual I have very little power. I can
quit, but if I feel like most workers in my industry are not treated fairly,
there's nowhere to go. However, if I organize with other workers, I have the
bargaining power to make certain demands: suddenly employers realize if they
want to employ people who have my skills, they have to meet certain reasonably
requirements with regards to hours, compensation, etc.

Things like the 40 hour workweek aren't just a result of market forces. Market
forces by themselves literally worked people to death - life expectancy in
Liverpool during the industrial revolution was 15. It was through organization
and struggle that workers achieved the rights they have today.

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

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

~~~
pjc50
> isn't palatable to some people

And doesn't seem to be economically viable for _everyone_ to do, or we'd
already be doing it.

The main financial risk for people is that cashflow problems can lead pretty
rapidly to homelessness or health deterioration.

~~~
GFischer
See Coase's Theory of the Firm. Technology is changing the equation by
removing transaction costs, and you see more freelancers and self-employed and
Uber drivers.

I agree that the current framework makes freelancers and self-employed more
vulnerable to cashflow problems, and it's an issue.

I've seen some interesting ways to mitigate it, even in my own country (with
affordable health services for small business owners but they have salary caps
that exclude IT workers)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

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

None of the employees are happy with this situation, but job scared that
they'll simply be replaced by those who won't complain, and blacklisted.

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

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

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

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

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

The key message is this:

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
gnarbarian
And again I will claim that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have choice. Make good decisions.

~~~
pjmlp
Actually, in Europe many countries do have unions for sport players as well.

Here is the Portuguese web site for football (soccer) just as an example, not
going to list everything here.

[http://sjogadores.pt/](http://sjogadores.pt/)

------
canthonytucci
Why only game workers? Why not software workers/codewriters in general?

I'd prefer something closer to SAG than the auto workers union personally.

~~~
driverdan
Why do "software workers/codewriters" need a union? It's an employee's market.

~~~
giantsloth
In NYC you expected to be at work at most companies for 9-10 hours a day, you
are expected to go to all their social events, and you are expected to act
like a logic lording startup bro (even when the company is far past the
startup stage). Sure, they give you free treats, sure it's not hard to come by
a job, but you are still ultimately expected to give up your autonomy to
become a startup stooge.

~~~
driverdan
That would give a hiring advantage to companies that don't demand that.

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cabaalis
I see no problem with game workers unionizing, but when I want to release my
indie game on itch or steam and I am stopped because I have to pay dues to the
union, we'll have a very real and unfriendly discussion.

~~~
EliRivers
Many unions don't demand dues from other people just to work in the same
industry.

A lot of people here (not you particularly; just that I might as well say it
somewhere) have a very stereotyped view of what a union does, seeing it as
some kind of compulsory enforcer that ties its members hands and goes around
stopping outsiders working. I can't speak for everywhere, but my experience of
unions in the UK is very different. Maybe this union could be modeled on that
kind of approach. There's also the German Betriebsräte style which looks
really interesting.

For an industry full of people that spout about disruption and how things are
different and what new technology can do to empower people, there seems to be
this picture of "unions" stuck inside people's heads that involves Jimmy Hoffa
sending some thugs round to smash up your workshop because you sold product
without going through the union, and large mafioso "encouraging" workers to
join. At risk of massively generalising, that picture seems strongest inside
the heads of our US colleagues; is the anti-union propaganda particularly
effective there, or are the unions particularly stuck in that stereotypical
Jimmy Hoffa style?

~~~
DanBC
To be fair the UK had to introduce law to stop "closed shop" unions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_Kingdom)

> All forms of closed shops in the UK are illegal following the introduction
> of the Employment Act 1990. They were further curtailed under section
> 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992
> (c. 52)[7] passed by the Conservative government at the time. The Labour
> Party, then in opposition, had supported closed shops until December 1989,
> when it abandoned the policy in accordance with European legislation.[8]
> However, Labour shadow arts minister Thangam Debbonaire announced to an
> Equity conference in May 2016 that she favoured the introduction of a
> "limited" closed shop for actors, as part of Jeremy Corbyn's pledge to
> strengthen and introduce a new package of employment rights beneficial to
> employees.[9] Equity was one of the last trade unions in the United Kingdom
> to offer a pre-entry closed shop until the 1990 act.[9]

~~~
EliRivers
Indeed; that's certainly how it was, but now we can have something better.
That's the old way, which I certainly agree had to go, although even that
didn't stop someone else working in the same industry.

1990 is well before my experience, but soon enough I expect to be telling
people how I was there for the crash of September 2000, before they were born.

------
crysin
As someone who went to school for game design but hasn't actually been blessed
yet with getting a job in games, this seems like an interesting idea. I know
from my personal experience at the software companies I have worked that the
culture is what drove the work to personal life ratio. My first job out of
school was a start up and when the product the team I was a part of was
nearing it's set-in-stone deadline, for about 3 months I was working 6 days a
week and about 12ish hours a day. We weren't a game studio but we still had a
taste of that crunch time that the game industry is infamous for.

------
Paul_S
A union will solve nothing other than leeching off some money from the workers
(yay!). If you want to solve the problem you have to educate the credible
little children who think working in gamedev is a privilege and are willing to
work for free because "games!". Currently and for decades there has been an
infinite supply of these, hence all the junior and mid roles pay less than
half than any other industry.

~~~
cardplayer
You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own pocket
than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical and non-
technical co-workers. Apparently, he only believes that innovation is possible
everywhere else besides unions and collective bargaining. Be positive my
friend, I’m sure we’re capable of creating a new type of union in 2018.

~~~
snuxoll
> You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own
> pocket than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical
> and non-technical co-workers.

As someone who eats, sleeps and breathes automation projects you (probably)
won't find somebody more worried about the human costs of automation than me.
90% of our job as an internal development team is to reduce labor costs by
automating various tasks, and while we continue to grow staffing because we
have continued to grow our list of contracted facilities there will be a day
(even if it's a decade or more away) that REDUCTION in workforce is a
possibility - I fear that day, and I can only hope by that time our
civilization is prepared for it.

> Be positive my friend, I’m sure we’re capable of creating a new type of
> union in 2018.

We've always been capable, unions people complain about are almost always a
direct result of poor participation by members - if you want things to change
make your voice heard and vote on union issues, it's no different from
politics in that fashion.

------
Meph504
I see a lot of people arguing about how unions protect workers, and in some
cases that is true, but in my experience many have been corrupted. You only
have to look at the coal workers, steel workers, and several other unions,
that's leadership has been corrupted, and serve their own interest at the
expense of everyone else.

Additionally, things like agency fees, where even if you work somewhere with a
Union, and you are denied membership, and member only benifits you can still
be required to pay the union, for their "collective bargaining benifits."

There are also the nightmares of union fiefdom, if a light bulb burns out in
your office and you want it changed, you can wait till a union employee comes
to do it, or you can pay the union the minimum call out fee (usually a couple
of hours) after doing it yourself.

Unions have completely failed at protecting retirement plans, and preventing
age discrimination across the country.

I can't understand how anyone can honestly evaluate the performance of unions
in the last several decades and think that implementing one would in anyway
make for a better work life situation.

~~~
adamsea
Yeah but the United Mine Workers Association (a coal union) got us the eight
hour workday - before that, they just exploited the shit out of you.

"Back when the government first tracked workers' hours in 1890, full-time
manufacturing employees worked a backbreaking 100 hours each week. Years of
pressure from laborer organizers, along with changes from companies like Ford
Motor, reformed working conditions in the U.S. and protected workers from
schedules that endangered their health and safety."

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-
chang...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-changed-how-
americans-work.html)

~~~
maxxxxx
People are forgetting how life was when the capitalists got their way without
any legal worker protections. Read about the conditions in british coal mines
or in carnegie's steel mills. We should not go back to these days and unions
are an important part of preventing that.

------
Paul_S
"We are a currently-forming anonymous and horizontal organization" \- what
does that mean in English?

~~~
lalaithion
They don't publish the names of their members and they don't have a tiered
structure of who does what. Everyone presumably reports to a small group of
leaders.

------
theyinwhy
Great to see some movement here!

------
ttoinou
I have read the whole website and failed to see one concrete example of action
that the union could take to make game-industry employees' life better

    
    
       Game Workers Unite is a broad-reaching organization
       that seeks to connect pro-union activists,
       exploited workers, and allies across borders
       and across ideologies in the name of
       building a unionized game industry.
    

Even compatible with the libertarian ideology :p ?

~~~
lalaithion
Libertarians should, in principle, be okay with people exercising their
personal freedom to form a union.

~~~
changoplatanero
The issue is that people not in the union are not free to pursue their own
negotiations.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Libertarians usually say that everyone should be free to form contracts
without government restriction. Why shouldn't unions get the same freedom to
form binding contracts that everyone else gets?

------
SeanBoocock
I've been working in game development as a software engineer for going on
seven years and am happy to see this initiative. Unions nothwithstanding there
is plenty of variation in the working conditions throughout the industry. The
best empirical reflection of that is the annual IGDA surveys:
[https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/2017_...](https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/2017_DSS_/!IGDA_DSS_2017_SummaryReport.pdf).

If you find yourself at a studio with poor working conditions, know that there
are plenty of studios that better respect you and your time. Hopefully
unionization, or at least the threat of it, will raise the floor on the
conditions and compensation for the employees most often exploited:
contractors generally and QA specifically.

------
andrewmcwatters
Supply and demand. Turns out a lot of people want to develop games and are
willing to be underpaid compared to other developers.

Either an overwhelmingly high amount of developers join a game developer union
and raise salaries, or a company will simply hire someone else.

~~~
131012
Workers in the game industry are not only devs. There are also artists,
testers, IT techs, marketers. I'm not sure the biggest issue is about the
salary, but the (unpaid) overtime, precarity, sudden lay-offs, etc.

~~~
horsecaptin
Okay, let's call it compensation. That is a good umbrella term that includes
salary, overtime and benefits.

The compensation for game workers sucks compared to their counterparts in
other software fields. This is probably because it is sexier to be a game dev
than, say, working at Salesforce.

It is a good idea for game industry workers to form a union or guild.

~~~
ttoinou

       it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.
    

So what should we do, besides educate people about the reality of working in
this industry (which is not really the point of an union) ?

~~~
horsecaptin
When the industry is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor, some
type of a union apparatus is the most affective way to ensure fair
compensation.

Yes, we can educate others who want to enter the industry, but when you're
graduating out of university with a fat debt, you'll accept the poor working
conditions for long enough and the cycle will continue to perpetuate.

The best protection against predation is for the prey to act together.
Predators will always divide and conquer and go after the weak, and so the
weak must be protected. The other way is increased competition - but our
environment is becoming more and more anti-competitive.

~~~
ttoinou

       is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor
    

You need to think about WHY this situation happens. I'm willing to believe
grouped negotiations can bring value to a class of workers but it's a partial
remedy to a bad situation.

    
    
      but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt
    

Paying expensive university could be a really bad decision, especially in
markets like game industry / software dev, which doesn't require by law that
you pass some exams. Funnily, once you create huge syndicates / unions for the
game industry or software dev, maybe you'll see these kind of "protection" to
emerge

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

------
jayd16
I see a lot of comments talking about employees butting heads with managers
and somehow a union will protect them. I don't really see what role a union
has in that particular case.

I just want those poor bastards in QA to get overtime or full time benefits.

------
ugh123
Consider some of the negative affects of unions when working alongside low and
high performers in technology:

\- Protection for under performers alongside high performers. Difficult or
darn near impossible to terminate employment. Ability to enforce performance
evaluation and plans could be killed by the union. Common in teacher unions.

\- Without being able to measure performance, pay may be solely based on
tenure, not skill.

~~~
brann0
That, sir, is just FUD. The dangerous type.

Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy
with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready
to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.

If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to
adapt, and not the other way around.

~~~
humanrebar
> But be ready to prove it.

How do you prove that an employee took two weeks to find a bug that should
have taken one day to find?

How do you prove that writing a domain-specific language was a bad decision
compared to defining a complex XML schema?

How do you prove that an engineer is bad at explaining technical concepts?

~~~
ginko
Which side are you on?

~~~
cmalloc
I don't think the grandparent's point is an issue of sides. It's more of a
problem of gathering a useful heuristic of an engineer's performance. Given a
variety of every day engineering tasks, how can you know exactly the
difficultly of a person's work short of having done it yourself? I believe
that experience is the answer in some cases, but others it is not. As another
poster stated, it could also be done by working with the engineer through it
all.

~~~
humanrebar
That's basically my take. A lot of evaluation is properly subjective and
qualitative. Both bosses staring at deadlines and union negotiators clamoring
for paper trails and predefined metrics are going to be bad for the industry
and therefore workers, at least in the long run.

------
kakarot
Anonymous unions... Now _that 's_ a concept I'm very interested in. Where does
the negotiating power come from?

------
xstartup
I think partly this has to do with "the struggle" factor.

Once, I had this guy who owns a big gaming company and I asked him the same
question, why do you treat these employees, unlike other software companies?

He said, there was a time when he no one would apply for open job listings at
his company because they had less money or they were not very hot. And that he
understands, he can push the people around as he has earned it. So, it seems
there is some revenge and ability to justify worse at work here.

What can you do? There aren't that many successful companies and the even if
there are, they aren't growing as fast as your SV startup, so they do not need
increasing supply of labor.

------
robbomacrae
I've seen first hand how terrible dev environments such as EA are compared to
startups and tech giants in SV. But that said.. in an industry where the
barrier of entry for new games companies is so low, why is this even
necessary? Any group of disgruntled employees with some ideas for games can
say enough is enough and go start their own games company where they treat
people better and subsequently attract talent (whilst raising the bar for
everyone else).

~~~
giantsloth
The idea that it’s simple to build, design, audio engineer, graphic design,
run a company, market the product, do accounting/taxes, figure out your legal
stuff, etc is patently absurd

------
fouc
I thought game workers were going to be gamers that work in the game to mine
or product products or similar.

------
Pinkertron
This is the best news I’ve seen on this site for years.

------
typeformer
Solidarity!

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ManlyBread
So what does this do exactly?

