I think of it like this:

It's the company's job to maximize shareholder value.

It's the worker's job to maximize worker value.

It's the market's job to push profit to zero.

So the union is like a new force in the equation: they put pressure on the company to give the workers more value.

Which could actually be good for business: if treating workers results in better work product, the shareholders might not push for that (typically markets optimize for quarterly earnings). But the union can secure better conditions for the workers, which might lead to moving to a better local maxima.

I always think of unions as less a new force in the equation you described and more of a labor side equivalent of the collective organizing and action that happens on the company/shareholder side to maximize value. Instead of individual workers all trying to maximize their value in isolation with the company trying to collectively maximize value for all shareholders, unions ideally make it more of a one-to-one balance of "workers" and "shareholders".

I agree with your general thought that it could be good for business, but I'd take it a small step further and suggest a more comprehensive way to think about what's good for business as encompassing workers and shareholders equally. A situation that optimizes shareholder value at the expense of worker value is not really economically optimal even if that doesn't necessarily damage the business long term. If you can get much better conditions for workers with only a small drop in shareholder value, for example, that could be considered a net win.

> only a small drop in shareholder value, for example, that could be considered a net win.

only the shareholders can decide if this is worth a drop. And i would imagine the majority of them would not accept a small drop like that.

When shareholders reduce a company to a single metric[shareholder value] the metric becomes meaningless. At that point it doesn't matter.

I’m not sure it’s fair if the product ends up making a boat loads of money. Games are high risk but a very lucrative industry.

Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

> Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

In this case they are the product, and there are a lot of customers. Plenty of people working on the things that make those players valuable, building and staffing stadiums, and filming and broadcasting events worldwide, that don't get a share. Because they aren't the product.

> that don't get a share

They wouldn't have those jobs if the players or the league did not exist. That's their share. They make a lively hood off the product's operations.

I agree. Check the comment I'm replying to for more.

Could you link? I reviewed you comment history and don't know which specific reply you're talking about in this thread. Thanks!

sure but the product is puppets and the devs are arguably the puppeteers.

What do you mean?

Not that successful, assuming you're talking about American football. The players as a whole get a bit less than half of all revenue coming in despite being the ones to actually, you know, play the game.

From what I can tell, that's fundamentally because of the limited number of franchises.

The situation is a bit like cabs in NY city before Uber/Lyft - the medallion owners were the ones who were making the real money.

Well, they (and the others) should be getting even less. States or cities subsidizing stadiums isn't as beneficial as originally thought. Those making obscene amounts of money from a public resource should probably contribute more to the infrastructure required to make that money.

That sounds a lot more successful than most other industries. I don't think software engineers, or retail employees are getting half of the business' revenue. That sounds like a pro union example.

Football players aren’t replaceable. At least not at the level people are willing to pay too dollar to watch.

Yes they are. College football gets big ratings every year with replaced players.

> College football gets big ratings every year with replaced players.

We're talking about professionals. If the Chiefs could replace Patrick Mahomes and save themselves $450,000,000 without impacting their business, they would.

The same people that think they're an irreplaceable 10x engineer think athletes are replaceable cogs... imagine that.

And how many Patrick Mahomes is there in Chiefs? Dozen? Dunno amount of players per team in not-football.

Worth noting that Football is a legal cartel, explicitly excluded from antitrust law. You can't really extrapolate much from it as an example.

It's true of association football (soccer) as well, and that's much less cartel-ised. The players have successfully extracted such a high proportion of the surplus that the returns for the club owners as a group are negative.

(I'm assuming by football you mean American football)

It's not really a fair comparison. The NFL is a monopoly, so there is no way for athletes to vote with their feet. At various times in the past, in order to negotiate the NFLPA has had to decertify in order to sue the league.

The NFL is also not a good proxy, because the average career for an NFL player is 2-3 years, and it is a physically dangerous job.

The analogy works with European soccer as well though, which isn't as much of a monopoly (given that the European model isn't franchise based).

* * *

I would argue that we're overvaluing the level of danger here. All athletes risk their entire career being cut short due to injury. What the European footballing system does (by not being franchised) is allow there to be multiple levels below the "top" level which then justifies the number of children trained in the game so there are careers (of varying degrees of profitability) for many of them.

However what we are discussing is rather the levels of money at the top of such an industry and that concept applies to both sports. Where Ronaldo can earn £25m in a year at Manchester United while still having his "dream job". Football in Europe since the Bosman ruling has allowed its players to share in the wealth of the industry; one could argue that programmers in the gaming industry are not afforded that same. It remains an interesting discussion as to exactly why that is and I think the risks that workers take are not as relevant to the amount of money available in the game and scarcity of the best employees available; which results in such inflationary salaries for the very best employees.

If a product makes a boatload of money how is it fair to the business to force them to pay more. What if the game instead went over budget and flopped? Should the workers now owe money to the company? Businesses that can figure out how to make the most money with the resources available to them deserve to make that money and it's unfair to take that money from them.

Being an NFL football player means you are in like the top 0.0001% of players in a very popular sport, so it's natural that you'd have some leverage.

With the added ingredient that fans follow players for a mixture of ability and personal brand. In that sense, it shares some similarities to acting. Names act as box office draws in ways that aren't purely about acting talent.

Lucrative for a select portion of games. Like music or acting, video game is a winner-take-all marketplace (or rather, winner take most). The typical video game developer outside a well-known studio is working long hours for comparatively little pay because it's very likely the game is not going to make very many sales and there's plenty of passionate people willing to make sacrifices to work on video games.

As other commenters pointed out, it's not like playing in the NFL. It's more like being a high school football player trying to get into the NFL. Or an actor trying to get a part in a Hollywood movie. The chances of a company becoming lucrative off games is slim.

Aren't the well-known studios also pretty big and the products they make absolutely humongous in simply the man hours? So even then there isn't that much to pay per employee.

There is some outliers, but simply most games either are not popular or even if they are they also take huge amount of labour to develop.

that's not a fair trade off. plenty of other "dream jobs" like athlete, lawyer, doctor, etc. pay gangbusters if you "make it". I'd add the most musicians "don't make it" either

it also goes beyond that, working conditions for game devs are truly abysmal. low wages are just the tip of the iceberg; add it abusive managers, long working hours, etc

This is a bit like libertarian dogma (ie "the market will sought it out").

Unions are the counterbalance to the innate desire (under a capitalist organization of the economy) to exploit. The entertainment industry has stron gunions (eg SAG, WGA). NBA, MLB and NFL all have unions.

People being able to support themselves sustains such industries. Without it, you'd face a race to the bottom as people would quite literally starve themselves for their "big break". Or, more likely, non-unionized creative fields would simply come to be dominated by "nepo babies" as is the case in many artistic fields.

The American brain rot here is that everyone thinks they're the exception, they're way above average and unions will somehow just drag them down to the lowest common denominator. Such people are easily manipulated, scammed and exploited.

Another way of looking at it is that unions are just as much a part of a capitalist free market as entities that organize capital. Since labor is a thing that has market value, a bunch of folks getting together to figure out how to maximize their valuable asset seems just as reasonable as folks with monetary or other assets doing the same. Unless anyone's idea of a libertarian free market is also anti-corporation, unions seem like they'd be an equal part of the picture.

This is all true, provided that membership is voluntary and such organizations get no special legal privileges.

Corporations get special legal privileges, why not unions too?

> Corporations get special legal privileges, why not unions too?

In industries with striking penalties, e.g. rail, it’s fair for unions to have mandatory membership.

In a free market environment, neither would have them.

There can be no such thing as a real free market. It's an inherently contradictory concept because it necessarily relies on a government strong enough to impose a private property rights regime but at the same time act against its own interests.

The initial argument was about whether or not unions could be considered a part of a true free market, and whether champions of capitalism should support their existence.

Your argument is that a free market cannot exist at all, which is not exactly what the discussion is about.

The capitalist free market is something that would reasonably he understood as free markets as they exist in the real system called capitalism under which coeporations have special legal protections.

If the original commenter meant something like "ideal free market" I imagine they would use those words instead of refering specifically to capitalism's free markets.

The real system known as capitalism would collapse immediately if we did away with the special legal protections given to corporations (chief amongst them being limited liability), so I think it's a pretty fair assessment to understand these to be inherent to capitalism, even in its most libertarian possible interpretation.

They were referring to the “idea of a libertarian free market”. Such an idea would not include limited liability for corporations protected by law.

The government might enforce observing contracts agreed upon by all parties, some of which may contain limited liability for individuals or organizations. But LLC in itself would not be a legal category intended to protect corporations.

The idea that you can at all limit your liabilities by contract is an artifice that originates in the idea of the limited liability corporation. You are not contractually allowed as an individual to limit your liabilities by mutual agreement in general because a great many rights and claims cannot be alienated by contract.

The vast majority of capitalists and libertarians have no pretence of being able to get rid of the LLC. The rest have an incoherent understanding of the situation, where you could somehow do it by mutual agreement while still having inalienable rights be a thing. Legal personhood is the only way to deal with that because you can then redirect claims and rights instead of trying to alienate them.

So you have to choose two between inalienable rights and claims, not having legal personhood, and being able to limit liability by agreement.

A simple example would be an organization which caused a personal injury by negligence. You can't alienate your right to life and health, so you can't possibly make a contractual agreement to limit such liability. If you remove the possibility to limit such liability, then who in their right mind could, for example, invest or agree to work in a hospital? How about a mine?

So the question is inevitable, and it turns out that legal privileges for groups that organise capital are necessary for practical capitalism. In the real world of course no libertarian can articulate a coherent way of either completely doing away with the concept of limiting liability or a way to do so without legal personhood and without allowing people to sign away their rights, which is why serious opposition to the concept is exceedingly fringe amongst libertarians.

I have to admit I don’t follow the full extent of your argument, not necessarily through your fault.

> You can't alienate your right to life and health, so you can't possibly make a contractual agreement to limit such liability.

Do you mean that those rights would be protected by law even in a libertarian society, so they couldn’t be defined by contracts? I don’t think many libertarians believe liability should be truly unlimited, at least not to the extent where it would be infringing on certain individual rights.

Even so, in the scenario where no one wants to enter into a contract with a company because it doesn’t provide certain protections, the company would have no choice but to either change the clause, or lose the employee to a competitor.

Replace employee with a group of employees organized into a union and you could have a similar outcome, all without a significant legal framework in place.

But again, I might be misunderstanding your line of reasoning.

Well, libertarians believe in natural law doctrine as a core belief, right? So you must have rights which can never ever be given up, not even by contract.

In the scenario it wouldn't be that no one would want to enter contract with the company because it couldn't provide those protections. Many protections are a result of inalienable rights, so you can't have a contract which removes those protections.

Since the organization wouldn't have legal personhood, it would mean that the owners and/or employees would be personally liable if the company were to violate one of those inalienable protections. That makes investment or membership in those organizations extremely unattractive.

For many types of organizations this isn't necessarily a problem, but for organizations in many sectors such as healthcare, anything that requires hazardous labour, the automotive industry, private security, etc..., it means that investment is really not a good idea because your personal liability might put you in jail.

This is of course because the organization couldn't negotiate a contract with it's clients where the clients would give up these protections, because these kinds of protections which derive from natural rights can't be given up.

So in the end you need legal personhood to protect the investor class, otherwise capitalism doesn't really work anymore when investors are too afraid by personal liability. And that's why legal personhood for the purpose of general enterprise started 300 years ago and is now a thing everywhere save for North Korea (even Cuba and the USSR had to allow citizens to form limited liability entities with legal personhood for economic activity, because even when you don't allow investors, limited liability turns out to be very practical when you have partnerships with very large numbers of partners)

Nope. If I cannot live comfortably for a dream job, I'll work on something else unfortunately. And work on whatever dream I have with whatever time and energy remains, if any.

Otherwise, I'd already be working on the exact things I want to work on, and earn almost nothing (for maybe a long time).

Isn't that your decision ? Why are these two situation related so differently:

I quit my boring job as a dev in the banking sector to work in agriculture, hours are longer and money is tighter but it's my dream job ! (Way to go ! Keep working your dream, money is not everything !!!)

I quit my boring job as a dev in the banking sector to work in the gaming industry, hours are longer and money is tighter but it's my dream job ! (OMG you should unionise, it's so exploitative !!!)

> Isn't that your decision ?

Of course, but that's the whole point. You want to have me? Give me good working conditions! I'm probably not alone.

I would not relate these two situations differently. Agriculture or gaming industry, working conditions need to allow comfortable living, dream job or not.

I'm not saying anything about unions in my previous comment, but my position is that whether it's a dream job for you should not change anything on your decision to unionize. Not even mentioning unions, you are entitled to require good working conditions regardless.

What's more, your employer has all the incentive to provide you with comfortable living if you could be employed elsewhere with better conditions because you could change your decision to work for them at any time (your situation could change: new child, new housing, medical expense, etc; or even your tastes).

(I'm speaking about comfortable living, not the highest pay you could have somewhere else - even if still gives you some leverage)

What's different in the two situations you expose is that someone working in agriculture has (unfortunately) likely less leverage on their pay negotiation because they would less likely be able to find a place where they would be paid more (if there's no other domain they could work in).

> You want to have me? Give me good working conditions! I'm probably not alone.

At those conditions they also very much might not want to have you. And apparently the total package "industry prestige + working condition + pay" is attractive enough for just the right amount of people that they need.

You can argue that it's not a fit for you, but you can't argue that the equilibrium itself that has been reached between the industry and the workers is inherently wrong or that it should magically change in favour of one of the sides.

Note that I was answering to "Doesn't that make it a fair trade?".

I can't argue that things are the way they are (including the equilibrium you are talking about), but that's not I'm trying to do.

"fair" is fairly subjective.

Free market is not necessarily fair (and I don't think it is). That may be part of the reasons why workers are unionizing in the discussed article by the way.

Precisely. Game developers accept lower standards because they think its worth it. I don't, but they're free to work for less if they want.

Why would you think that's fair? We don't choose our talents nor our passions. You should get a decent share of however much value you create. How much you like your job doesn't come into it because it's random.

Because not only is it consensual, but developers are actively sacrificing things to be in the game industry. When you have alternatives you aren't being exploited.

Shrug I would hate to work in the game industry. I've made games as hobby projects. In all honesty, they're the most boring kind of programming I've done. Game testing sounds even worse.

My current work is pretty boring to other people, but I like it. Would it be right for someone in my role who hates the work to make more money?

> When you have alternatives you aren't being exploited.

That's a narrow definition. Perhaps a better definition is when the other party knows you don't have leverage and takes advantage of it, you're being exploited.

Paying you little, knowing you'd work for a low wage because this is your passion? Exploitation.

Horrible working conditions, wages, and abuse knowing you're an illegal immigrant with no recourse? Exploitation.

Knowing you need the job for visa purposes and asking you to come in for a 2am code review because a new CEO wants to feel like an engineer? Exploitation.

> Paying you little, knowing you'd work for a low wage because this is your passion?

Closer to paying you little because there are others who will accept those low wages.

One of these examples is so unlike the other two that it's outrageous.

> Horrible working conditions, wages, and abuse knowing you're an illegal immigrant with no recourse? Exploitation.

Yes. This scenario includes factors that are depriving the worker of agency, chiefly the lack of recourse due to their illegal immigrant status.

> Paying you little, knowing you'd work for a low wage because this is your passion? Exploitation.

No. If the worker is passionate about their job and is willing to tolerate low wages and long hours that's their decision. Agency is not being deprived. The worker should rethink whether working in their dream field is a good decision, and change jobs. If enough people do it, then the company will not be able to fill positions and will have to change labor practices or close shop. But, chances are, there's plenty of people willing to fill this role and the company is simply following the labor market.

> Knowing you need the job for visa purposes and asking you to come in for a 2am code review because a new CEO wants to feel like an engineer? Exploitation.

Maybe. Was this part of the job description? Some companies are upfront about expectations around crunch time or oncall responsibility. Others are not. Are there factors limiting a worker's agency? I'd say it'd be exploitative to change the work responsibilities on someone who has limited agency to change jobs. An H1B worker whose residency is tied to employment, as you suggest, I would consider exploitative.

Most video game development falls in the middle category. The whole industry has a widespread reputation for demanding crunch time - I don't think one would reasonably say they were deceived if asked to crunch near release. They also have skills that are in demand with plenty of other fields. Heck, the company I work in now acquired a video game studio to work on a 3D Geodesy UI, and everyone's salary basically doubled and they were able to work roughly 9-5.

Industry should pay more for people that motivated to do the work. That this level of motivation would be used against employees strikes me as more of an indicator that there is a problem with the industry, perhaps collusion among the big players to keep wages low.

That kind of thing (collusion by big players to keep wages low) strikes me as exploitative.

> We don't choose our talents nor our passions

You choose your job, though. I'm not overly passionate about what I do, but do it for the stress:compensation ratio.

That's exactly my point. There are people who do the same job as you and love it. They may not even feel stress. Should they be paid less than you?

Gaming software engineers, relative to a FAANG engineer for example, are willing to work for less money, work in worse conditions due to a tradeoff for working in a field they are fanatically passionate about. It doesn't matter whether they should or should not be, it just is. That's what those engineers are willing to do. Gaming companies exploit this for profit. If you were a for-profit organization you would do the same - the market is telling you to do it. Whether that is evil or not is up for you to decide.

Same thing happens in fashion, media and entertainment.

>Same thing happens in fashion, media and entertainment.

And many of those industries unionized to prevent the systematic abuse!

If there was a headline

"Abuser abused many girlfriends in a row" you'd excuse their behavior saying there are plenty of other guys out there they could go with instead.

> you'd excuse their behavior saying there are plenty of other guys out there they could go with instead.

Where was I excusing it? I was simply laying out the market reality. If you want to say certain classes of professions "deserve" less or more money, then shouldn't we expand this discussion to all professions (teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc.)? No one is really saying they deserve less, but rather that this is the market reality.

If gaming devs want to unionize then that's their prerogative.

The answer is as simple as supply and demand.

If there are 200,000 devs who want to work in game dev and 4,000 roles then wages will be depressed by over-supply. This is observable in all sorts of industries, often bordering on exploitation of people who desperately want to work in a specific area and are willing to work on low/no wages to get experience.

You'll also see companies over-paying when key skills are hard to source as the natural complement.

You're reaching into "cosmic justice" territory, which is a really bad place to be. It's not up to you or anyone else to fix the fact that the universe is inherently "unfair" (re: people with different passions, dispositions, and life situations), and certainly giving any entity sufficient power to attempt to solve for cosmic injustice is simply paving a road to tyranny with golden intentions.

Well right now there are existing entities with too much power, unions provide a second (less) powerful entity to balance the unchecked power of corporate leaders.

It’s not about correcting a cosmic wrong, it’s about people wanting more power and using a tool to get it.

It really is, though, about correcting cosmic wrongs, because it is the world view you must first hold to believe something "unjust" is occurring when someone voluntarily bargains to work long hours for lower pay to be able to work their dream job. The next step is to pass legislation or push for judicial or executive action to try to "correct" for the injustice. The U.S. already has several very counter-productive pro-union labor laws it has accumulated over the years, and, under democrat presidents like Obama and Biden, the NLRB rules heavily in favor of unions:

https://cei.org/blog/biden-says-he-wants-to-be-the-most-pro-...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/12/adversarial-labor-law...

These laws and actions don't make the world more just. On the contrary, they just add new injustices on top of the old ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

Not at all. I just object to the toxic idea that professions should pay more or less based on how much much people like doing them. Justify salaries based on supply and demand, and value creation.

"Your job is fun/cool/meaningful whereas my work makes me hate myself. Therefore, I deserve more money than you" is an awfully sour worldview.

Working conditions or health and safety, are not up for debate no matter how amazing or terrible the job is.

> should pay more or less based on how much much people like doing them. Justify salaries based on supply and demand, and value creation.

Reread your sentence and think real hard about it because you're saying the same thing, you're just conflating the premise. Gaming devs ARE based on supply and demand. As one of the other comments points out, the demand is outsized relative to other developer positions (e.g. SaaS dev). Simple supply and demand tells us if the demand is higher, then the price goes down. There ya go.

> Therefore, I deserve more money than you

No one is saying this.

> you're saying the same thing, you're just conflating the premise

I understand the effect of passion on supply. You might think I'm making a distinction without a difference but I disagree. We shouldn't normalize the idea that well-paying work has to be unpleasant. "It's called 'work' because it's not fun" is a harmful idea.

> No one is saying this.

Read the comment I originally responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245152

Should they be paid less is not the right question. The question is would they be willing to do it for less, and the answer is probably yes.

No one else generally makes a killing off musicians that aren't also making a killing.

Musicians are generally exploited, too. I don't really see the argument against forming a union just because you enjoy your job. More worker power is a good thing.

Making music is usually not a job. You're making your own intellectual property and sometimes you're successful in selling it.

Should we subsidize other kinds of unsuccessful businesses too?

Making music is very much a job for studio and road crews, and those workers could benefit from a union.

And how are unions subsidization?

…you realise not everything is a business, right? That things like the arts deserve to exist irrespective of whether they make money?

Musicians and people associated with film media also have collective bargaining via unions.

For example the musicians have the AFM which helped force labels and radio stations to pay royalties to artists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Music...

> Doesn't that make it a fair trade? Musicians generally don't make a killing either.

What are giving me to make it fair?

My feeling of internal satisfaction is genersted in my body, they are not supplying me drugs and cocaine.

Some musicians make a killing and get royalties - who in gane industry gets millions in royalties?

Musicians are not the ones raking in all the money - the record companies are the ones doing that. There are plenty of articles about how artists would have made more money working at McDonalds while the record company brought in 8-9 digits of revenue. In TLC's case, their 2 albums sold over $100,000,000 yet the 3 artists each received less than $50k. The studio and management companies made bank.

Samples: 0 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

1 - http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/25/business/tlc-settles-suit-...

> The group later revealed that the owner of Pebbitone made them pay $3 million to own the rights to their name.

2 - https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/tlcs-crazysexycool-...