"Unionized" is not the same as "not willing to put in more work". It's more about "not willing to put up with more bullshit".
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
> "Unionized" is not the same as "not willing to put in more work". It's more about "not willing to put up with more bullshit".
The point is, though, many people are willing to put up with that "bullshit" (which, judging by what you say later, mostly revolves around working hours contrary to what you write in this first paragraph). As much as we try to convince ourselves that crunch time and long hours don't work, plenty of studios demonstrate that is does. RDR2 is probably one of the best games of 2018 and it relied on crunch time. At the end of the day, a studio that can't demand crunch time is going to be at a disadvantage compared to those that can.
In an ideal world we'd all have well paying jobs in fields we love that offer good work life balance. But we don't live in the ideal world, we live in the real one. And many game developers are willing to make the sacrifice of long working hours.
It's not work if you are just looking at your monitor like a zombie. That's just heating the chair with your butt. So yes, bullshit. If a manager doesn't realize that, he should be fired.
You didn't address the more important point: Managers can get away with it by moving production to cheaper places. It's already happening anyway.
What a lot of people don't realize is that unions can also cause wage suppression when they decide that more members working is better than fewer members working at higher pay.
Managers can also get fired when they plan unrealistic goals or keep changing signposts instead of forcing the devs to solve their problems. Unions can make that happen.
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.