As someone on the employee side (not games), I too want my company to be able to fire bad employees at will. Having been at companies that do and don't, I very much prefer the ones that do lest the workplace become bloated with low quality.

> It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.

I'm not convinced in the current market that those interests need serving to the detriment of the better devs. Were the employers in a more favorable position I could see a different view. But right now any half-way capable dev (i.e. not "rock star") has plenty of current advantages sans union.

A union is ultimately just labor doing collective bargaining, which is certainly something capital+management does. What is bargained for isn't set in stone; while lots of people are interested in making sure firing isn't arbitrary, labor doesn't have to bargain over making people unfire-able, or even on specific compensation. A well-run union bargains for what its membership wants. If a union of software developers wants competent productive co-workers, then it can leave at-will firings on the table and instead push for limits on hours worked per week, or bonuses based on revenue (with access to the books to double check), or employment agreements that vigorously protect individual IP rights to anything made on their own time, or sane office layouts instead of open plan, or a generous severance package with at-will firing, or provisions for no confidence votes for some management positions, or, well, any number of things.

What else can you imagine beyond compensation or job security that could be improved in the lot of a software developer? Maybe even some things could yield productivity benefits that management would like if they could see their way through it? And if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?

In the current market, I'd rather bargain for myself. We shouldn't pretend what a union wants is what every one of its members wants. Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support. I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee. I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary. Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market, I find individual bargaining to currently be more beneficial than collective bargaining.

> if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?

Because of all the negative externalities that happen to some employees and employers. If it was all upside there would be no reason. It's not ruled out as a tool, just its use in the current dev (general, maybe not game specific) market.

> We shouldn't pretend what a union wants is what every one of its members wants.

We shouldn't pretend that what a union wants is arbitrarily disjointed from the individual interests of its members, either.

Every collective has the potential to depart from individual preferences in some way. How much that happens varies in practice.

And it's pretty likely that your employment agreements are not an exception, even if you've arrived at them without any collective work on your side.

> Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support.

This assumes the only incentive for joining a union is ultimate job security. That's a popular anti-union conception, but that doesn't make it correct. Any popular benefit that is not commonly conferred could provide a cohesion point for collective bargaining.

> I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee.

Increasing the cost of something is very different from making it defacto impossible. Though it is one way of providing an incentive against doing something arbitrarily. And it's not clear a negotiated price for firing would be any more "artificial" than any other negotiated price, up to and including your salary.

> I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary.

That's pretty much how unions work. It just turns out to have more leverage if you multiply it by the size of the participating workforce.

> Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market

Again, the freedom of individually negotiated compensation can co-exist with collective bargaining. A sibling comment even points out examples.

Hollywood unions provide protections on the low-end and the high-end while letting those at the high-end negotiate better pay packages...

Doesn't make much sense. Collective bargaining is just that. If you trust the company to do what is best you should have no problem because the company will bargain for what it finds important. Also you seemingly care a lot about what would happen with a union, but essentially nothing about how you are treated by the company. That isn't really a very strong position to make an argument from. If your whole idea is that you don't mind taking other opportunities, presumably it would be worth it for you to move to a company that isn't unionized in the same way you would if you didn't agree with what he company was doing.

"A well-run union bargains for what its membership wants." how? if it's via democracy then no thanks, as that comes with so many issues it's not even funny.

I think making these arguments at this point shows just how effective the decades long campaign of anti-union propaganda has been.

How great did those rockstar employees do when google and other massive companies engaged in anti-poaching agreements to drive salaries down? How good do they do when they end up divorced and miserable after putting in yet another 2 months of 100 hour work weeks?

I think not recognizing the arguments as built instead of propaganda-fed shows how effective the anti-corporate narrative has become.

Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion. What is with all the appeal to emotion with divorced, miserable, 100 hour work weeks, etc? Most employees did just fine anyways. Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying "but tell that to the employee that was divorced, overworked, blah blah emotional language". At a macro level there are practical concerns.

There are many different types of unions, ranging from the destructive (i.e., Teamsters) to the cooperative (Hollywood guild-unions).

The anti-union propaganda did an amazing job at making most people think that all unions were like the corrupt Teamsters unions of NYC and Chicago, when most of them are nothing at all like that.

Most employees did just fine anyways.

Categorically false. Most employees did fine because unions negotiated the labor rules that led to those "fine" working conditions. Those conditions have worsened as unions have lost their leverage.

> Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion.

You could make that same argument against the concept of defense lawyers. How would you feel if you had to defend yourself against criminal charges without a lawyer? Do you think justice would be served if you had to go it alone against a well-funded, experienced team of prosecutors who want to convict?

Yes, defense lawyers aren't perfect and can't stop all prosecutorial misconduct, but they still help a lot. Ditto with unions.

> Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion.

And unions have labor lawyers. Wouldn't it help the prosecution to add positions whose job would be to identify such issues, and which have visibility across employers?

Today, without a union, how would you as an individual ever know if companies are colluding against you and other workers? What would you do to cause this offense to be prosecuted?

> Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying ...

I agree with this sentence, but I draw from it the opposite conclusion. I think most jobs would get value out of a union.

I don't understand your logic here. If something is desirable for everyone, then everyone should do it. We shouldn't assume it's not possible for everyone, and therefore conclude that it must not have been desirable in the first place.

Unionization helps because of the threat of well organized action against the company, including litigation.

Not all unions are like public employee unions.

If they unionize, game developers are most likely to copy the union/guild format of Hollywood unions, which provide salary and health protections but otherwise let the members determine employment terms on their own (i.e., contracts for days, weeks, full projects, long-term, or open-ended are all acceptable).

Protecting bad employees is not really what game industry unionization is all about. Its more about standardizing job titles and accreditation, like film industry unions.

Admittedly I assumed this thread had devolved to general development unionization. If game industry employees are valuable, not easily replaceable, limited to only a few companies, and can't easily repurpose themselves then unionization has value.

Unions in Hollywood place a useful role of insuring proper credit and arbitrating when there is a dispute. Some game publishers have tried to avoid credits, partly to make it more difficult to know which employees to poach. But I have seen credits sorely abused in some instances.

It would be great if we could fire bad bosses.

That's the beauty of the current over-abundance of demand for devs. You fire bad bosses by quitting. Simply put, if you want to pick your best company, you have to be willing to find it. Similarly, if an employer wants to pick their best devs, they have to be willing to do things like not have bad bosses. In markets where demand is constrained, mobility may not apply, but neither do the benefits of cross-company unions.

I've been an employee for 80% of my career and from a moral standpoint I believe in treating people fairly.

The current unionization efforts provide almost no details on their goals beyond "everything will be better for everyone". On either end of the employee/employer relationship I have a hard time seeing how anyone can support such a generic effort.

A hard stance on working conditions and compensation is a starting point for a real conversation. The majority of employees would have no problem supporting this, and since I already value work/life balance and fair compensation, my motives and interests would align.

Then this doesn't affect you. Even in industries that have unions, the smaller shops are frequently non-union, and if you treat employees well, they won't have any incentive to organize.

The community theatre down the street doesn't require every performer to be an cardholding AEA member, and it wouldn't make financial sense for anyone involved (management, workers, or audiences) for that to change. The mere existence of a union doesn't necessarily change anything unless workers want it to change.

For big game dev companies that have repeatedly shown that they don't believe in treating people fairly, this would bring professional representation to the workers' side. Even if the details are light at this point, I don't see how you can be against that in principle. The employer/employee relationship is inherently asymmetric, and this attempts to correct for that.

Let's use SAG as a blueprint for a game industry union.

If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.

I understand that not every union functions the same, but it is not hard to imagine that wherever there is a lot of money at stake the union will do everything in it's power, to well, seize power.

Considering the movie industry is dwarfed by the video game industry from a revenue point of view, I can very easily imagine this scenario repeating itself.

> If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.

I've never heard of unions working like this, this may be a US-specific thing. Unions are just workers right groups, if the company is big, the group is inside the company, if it's too small, you just apply to the local union. They help to negotiate better laws and benefits for the whole industry & also directly at a company level in big companies.

Union works this way in the US? Wow, this is not a clever way to achieve anything. I understand why some people are anti-union then.

Not all unions function this way, but this is one possibility.

I'm not a fan of unions either. That said, I won't work more than 40 hours in a week more than a handful of weeks out of the year. I'm 44yo now, and when I took my current job, I stated I only have about 1 crunch week a quarter in me. If I have to do more than one 40-50+ hour week a quarter, then it's not me that is the problem.

I don't work in gaming though. I would love to, but the pay for business development is frankly better with a lot less stress. I wouldn't mind seeing a push legislating that any salaried worker in a week must be granted an extra paid day off at 45 hours and each 5 hours above in a single week. That would stop, or at least compensate, the abuse.

I'm with you on the crunch limit, few weeks a year at most and even then anything beyond 50 hours is pointless from a productivity point of view.

Addressing overwork at the legislative level would get my support if there were a way to trade pain now for benefit later (e.g. your extra time off suggestion).

and how do you get such things addressed at a legislative level?

Maybe unions can be useful after all!

Are you suggesting that a significant portion of legislation is because of unions? Maybe a part of it, and probably so at the state level. As it stands, I shouldn't have to be in support of a union in order to support legislation.

Working with toxic or under performing employees is just as bad as having them work for you.

Absolutely. And it's morale poison for the rest of the team. I speak from experience.

Then don't let them into the union? Or, alternatively, fire them from the union. A modern union is not restricted to follow the same practices as ones for different times and industries.

Then the rules for firing toxic and under performing employees can be written into the union contract and how the union conducts its business... This isn't an unreasonable ask, no one is going to want to be saddled with a toxic person they can't get rid of.