But for every movie with the Micheal Bay or The Rock there are hundreds of unionized workers creating the explosions, car chases, and sets in the background. Just like developers they're the ones that make the production work but no one knows our name. (with few exceptions like John Carmack, but then again there are special effects experts with tv shows)
That depends on whether fixed costs of hiring another developer (and coordination costs) outweigh the variable costs of the current developers working more. The variable costs could be lesser quality of work when the developer is overworked or overtime laws.
Overtime laws are supposed to act as a penalty on companies for not hiring enough labour for the required task.
Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.
One intended result is that it would forcibly remove the option of externalizing the consequences of intentionally under-utilizing the labor pool. It prevents bad behavior (behavior that should already be illegal IMO). Freely exploiting your workers because they have no bargaining power should always discouraged.
I certainly agree that unions can make a big difference in the intermediate case.
This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.
Unionization in the game industry is not about magically thinking that higher salaries will appear out of thin air. It's about low-ranking employees coordinating with each other to correct some of the power imbalance versus executives so that rank and file can get a larger share of the pie.
But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?
If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.
I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.
What a shallow definition of Unions.
How about it's about grabbing a larger share of the pie for workers, so the CEO of Activation isn't making 300x the average worker? Or are you of the mind he's "earned" that?
This. Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.
Ultimately I don't think there is a right answer and which way you choose is up to you. But it sounds like a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
Lucky are those who are passionate about things the majority of the labor pool hates but many businesses need.
Edit: Just to prevent misunderstandings, this is my opinion on Unionisation in this particular industry where there are many (private) companies. It can be a different story if your only employers are not driven by profits and losses or are not in a competitive market (e.g. a government) and I wasn't trying to make a sweeping generic statement like "all unions are always bad"