So that might help, but some of NOA's current problem seems to be some mental baggage from their management about growing headcount after the struggles of the 3DS/Wii U era.
A normal company would have done layoffs. Nintendo doesn't do that, even without unions. But management who survived that era turned it into a culture of not taking on the seemingly existential risk of increasing permanent headcount in case there would be a future income crisis.
I'm not sure if unions would be more likely to help relieve that mental baggage, or help to force management to finally decide to work through it and figure out a way to manage for a stable workforce rather than this perm/temp duopoly that they have going on now.
imo The only time it works "well" is with successful indie companies.
Indie companies are the absolute worst - there are occasional success stories (like, say, No Man's Sky) but they always involve insane overtime and fiscal risk - Sean Murray sold his house to keep the company afloat. And No Man's Sky - even with all the controversy - is one of the biggest recent successes (with the last one to go as mainstream being Minecraft IMO). If you make those fiscal and health gambles and lose then you're SOL - there are thousands of games made by passionate people that could have been good that just never hit the right PR vein or happened to have a buggy v1.0 and got written off by the community.
These sweetheart deals are practically impossible for Indies (including ex-AAA workers) to compete against and replicate, and its leading to industry stagnation.
As long as the standard rate at Apple, Google, Valve, Microsoft, Sony remains 30%, I would not advise anyone to work in the games industry. At least Nintendo gives customers 5% cashback on Switch, leaving an effective commission rate of 25% (a major reason why that platform has been so successful and an oasis of success for Indie devs).
The first thing a GameDev Union should fight for is fair commission on these platforms, independent of entity size.
Still, it seems like there is a large oversupply of people who really want to work specifically on video games, and I think they deserve better working conditions than this, right? In an ideal world, there wouldn't be this Faustian bargain of "You can work on what you love, or you can be treated well at work."
Even RetroArch copied the Switch UI, which indicates that at least the enthusiast community feels similarly.
Underlying problem is that Nintendo has a non-viable business model combined with a culture that tolerates things like rigid work hours and low pay. They can't make life better for employees because their business model sucks.
The correct thing is to simply not work for them.
A union can force better working conditions and an appropriate price increase for their products can make that sustainable - if it's even really needed, tbh Nintendo isn't shy about pricing games pretty high when you take into account all the re-releases of titles they do.
"The Nintendo 3DS was released in 2011 and immediately stalled, burdened by the lack of a compelling launch line-up, the rise of smartphones, and a $249.99 price point. Nintendo was forced to move aggressively, slashing the system's price and rolling out special benefits for existing owners. A year later, Nintendo released the Wii U, which fared even worse."
Contractors aren't, by definition, any better or worse than full time employees. But when the going gets rough and the gruel is thin the good contractors will all immediately jump ship because, well, they're contractors - that will reinforce the concentration of lower skilled employees at your company and hurt overall morale.
Lastly, treating your coworkers like dirt will get them to give you the bare minimum to avoid being laid off and, if they're contractors anyways, that might not be any real threat - they can move back into the video game job market with the biggest most legendary game studio ever on their resume.
Sometimes Nintendo products don't strike a chord. It happens to any company with history in video gaming, including Sony and Microsoft.
Isn't the solution unions, akin to the heavily unionized movie / TV business? Short of that, Nintendo deserves some bad PR for this at least; as long as people keep leaking their crappy workplace conditions to the press, the execs will have to keep reading these articles, and maybe be they'll be incentivized to make things slightly better.