Having to adversarially game out every interaction just to thrive in the world, especially those interactions with entities that have a lot of power to make your life good or bad for a long time, is a serious burden to place on people, and unions can help to alleviate it.

I have also seen and read about the significant disparities in different demographic groups' (e.g. gender) willingness to do things like negotiate, and it can result in broad differences in outcomes.

(There's a lot of ways to work on that kind of issue, and I'm not necessarily trying to claim "unions" is the only or the best one, but they can help to mitigate problems of pay disparity.)

Unions don't necessarily eliminate pay disparity, but they work for increased worker benefits in total.

Unions are about protecting everyone from predatory employers like most game publishers. You go in and negotiate? You're fired; there are 100 more people out there with a compulsion to create and share with the world.

So yeah, unions. They address the issue of the party with money exploiting the non-monetary incentives. That's strictly better than assuming the problem is that people have non-monetary incentives.

Actors are certainly not unskilled, many are well paid, and some of the most vocally supportive of the SAG are the extremely well paid ones. They're also involved in an artistic pursuit, and similarly have various other options for converting their talent into cash ("selling out").

Yeah, it's a good idea to learn how to negotiate and good advice to leave a failing company if you can.

But "just learn to negotiate" is really a non-solution if the goal is to transform unacceptable industry wide labor practices.

The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?

I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA basketball players etc. have their wages depressed?

Maybe companies lowballing salaries, or being in secret, illegal cartels to drive down salaries of high earners like that lawsuit showing Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs did, can depress wages too?

> Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life

Yes, which is why companies have scores of lawyers, HR personnel etc. to draw up IP assignment agreements etc. In fact the company has people who specialize solely on negotiating salaries. Your advice is for workers to shun working in concert with their fellow workers since they're so high performing, and walk into this phalanx arrayed against them solo. You also advise someone spending the time to become a top performer to spend their spare time becoming better negotiators, in order to get over on the team of negotiating specialists they will be facing.

I can't speak to movie stars, but as for the NBA, there is absolutely the concept of a maximum salary (depends on years of service plus other things besides the point) in the collective bargaining agreement. This limits the compensation a player may receive from a team for a particular year. The top players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, would no question receive higher salaries if this limit did not exist.

As to whether or not the top players or even the players as a whole are better off or worse off for having a union, that's a horse of a different color. My gut feeling is that both classes are better off.

It's honestly a lot like development - it's hard to distinguish someone being lazy or bad from someone who's gotten stuck with difficult problems - or, more likely, problems that looked easier on the surface than they were in actuality. But, unlike development where these measures could potentially be discovered by reducing efficiency and forcing multiple devs to solve problems in parallel - that's impossible to do when every student is different at a basic level.

Public sector unions are an entirely different ball of wax because negotiation power and strike power are both limited. The management for public sector jobs doesn't determine budget; neither does the amount of revenue generated by the business. It's 100% a decision of a legislature, and that decision will often have absolutely nothing to do with the quality, performance, or demands of the actual faculty, staff, administration, or schools themselves.

For example, teachers are unioned and do have generally low pay[0]. However, I could point to police officers, which are also nearly ubiquitously unioned as well and they have high salaries[1] in spite of a training program that is generally less than a year[2].

The difference? Increasing police funding always looks good for both parties (or has historically). For teachers, half the political landscape has a plank that's all about de-funding public education in favor of 100% private education.

Furthermore, there's another factor: Teachers are generally women while police officers are generally men. That means the structural gender bias in salaries is going to be higher here than in careers where the genders are more equally divided.

In short, it's much more complicated than you're making it out to be.

[0]: https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries

[1]: https://www.indeed.com/career/teacher/salaries

[2]: https://www.insider.com/some-police-academies-require-fewer-...

I think this is a poor example because the challenge exceptional teachers have is that it's really hard to prove their outcomes in a short time-span. It might be 10, 20, 30 years before it becomes clear that a teacher had a large positive impact on the world, and by then they likely won't be around to collect a bonus.

Compare this to say, a trader who can point to hard PnL numbers over the previous quarters, or a sales person who has shipped X units.

Nobody forced them to work, they can leave, negotiate, refuse an offer, and there are still a lot of video game companies, so this is a market that doesn't need any regulation or unionization. They made a choice to get this job at a low salary.

The only complication is for young student idealizing the environment without knowing that the salary is bad. Well that's what this twitter trend is helping at. It will inform the high performer and keep them out of the field and companies will have to either raise salaries to re-attract them or accept lower performer.

Actors and athletes have extremely high visibility. They are singled out by fans who will show up to movies and games on that star power alone. A similar dynamic will not develop in the game programming world where even phenomenal developers labor in obscurity.

Maybe thats why your advice is "just be good"

I consider myself to be pretty skilled and would be happy to take a pay cut if I knew that money was mostly going to more junior folks (and not just being pocketed by corporations to be funneled into stock dividends).

Negotiation is an invaluable skill, as is a knowledge of self worth, but it's something that a lot of people have real issues with - it isn't taught in school and a lot of introverted people (this goes double for people on the autism spectrum) will have real lifetime issues developing it. I can't argue that negotiation is a large part of financial success in the modern world but it seems quite counter to how we'd like society to operate - I'd rather live in a world where wage transparency was a thing and wage advocacy could be contracted out.

IMO leaning on negotiation for compensation adjustment creates an unjust world.