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Comment by friendlybus | Hacker News Reader

Here is a direct example of unions slowing down the little guy in the entertainment industry:

Niko has to cut costs to make low budget films and the union mandates someone watch the camera feed for the director, completely unnecessarily in the modern era. The film industry is notorious for the boundaries around union and non-union work. Gary Oldman's decline of a role in Star Wars used union rules as an answer:

>Oldman's spokesman is reported to have told the newspaper: "Gary was excited and looking forward to working on the film. The snag is that the movie is being made without members of the Screen Actors Guild. It means Gary would have been working illegally overseas. Out of respect and solidarity with the other members, he could not and would not consider violating the rules of his union."

Unions bring many complications and seeing them as a universal good is a problematic perspective.

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Good on Gary.

"I don't do non-union work" is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

What wealth did he gain from being restrained by union rules? What benefit did he get from being collared?

You can't claim unions lift workers and then rope them in from opportunity with the other hand.

a decades long career as one of the more respected actors in the world and eventually an oscar.

Which he obtained from his talent, something he advertised as something he can do and others can't. Unionizing credit for his performances is as the same claiming credit for another man's work that nationalists do.

https://youtu.be/CIaWo-BlBjs?t=74

The union doesn't get credit for his performance, he just places value in the union. The point is he's had a tremendously successful career while supporting the union. It hasn't hurt him. He missed out on star wars by choice.

I asked you what benefit he gets and you listed his 'respected career' and 'eventually an oscar'. You directly answered the question about what union benefits you get from unions with his career. You are changing your reply.

Had he chosen to do nothing that career would never have succeeded. The union did not benefit him his career, his actions did. He had the opportunity to choose SW and did not because the cost of losing union membership was too high. So again, what did the union benefit him? If he was simply choosing to value the union for his own reasons, then you haven't answered the question, you've just shifted the answer to Gary Oldman who is not here to answer for you.

I generally agree. What we do need is better worker protections and consumer protections. Get rid of no-competes. Get rid of right to work statutes. Add mandatory retirement contributions. Add mandatory and standard severance packages.

That will just drive more employers towards part time employees and outsourcing.

The latter, I agree with the former reforms.

You also aren't getting this sort of top down reform without obtaining more political power than the upper class. That's not going to happen without better organizing (Union, political movements, whatever).

These utopian goals turn into dystopias.

They don't. They exist all over and work fine.

Except for all the times they don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Trade_Un...

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tsg3e/e...

> Get rid of right to work statutes.

Meaning that you're fine with me being required to join a union in order to work? No. I'd rather have the freedom to choose for myself, even if it means I have to give the same freedom to others.

No, I meant that when you take a job you are given a contract with clear rules about your job and for fixed durations. I was suggesting this instead of unions but this does require legislation.

The best outcome is the industry self-regulating these amendments into their business practices under the threat of unionizing, rather than actually turning the industry into an institution itself and losing it's creative spark.

The industry has had roughly 4 decades to make those self-regulating adjustments, how much longer should we wait?

Who is waiting? Most people I know that didn't like the conditions got better jobs in other industries. Finance pays well and is cushy in comparison. Architecture visualizations, media jobs, programming roles are easier to find after obtaining the ability to outperform the norms for other industries.

For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal. Do you unionize every fledgling industry? No. It hasn't been four decades in the making. The majority of bad sentiment has come in the past five years, exacerbated by a goldrush mentality and kickstarter burns. The goldrush is over, the big projects are paying out massively to employees. Star Citizen has spent hundred of millions on staff and capital and needs to raise more. Epic is pouring cash back into the industry rewarding workers.

There are more people employed in the industry than ever and some see the collective as a route to personal power. I can't agree with that.

> For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal

Really? So the Atari boom was niche? 500,000 arcade machines sold in 1982 was niche? 30 million Nintendo Entertainment systems in American homes was niche?

It hasn't been a fledgling industry by any reasonable measure for at least 25 years if not much longer.

How many artists, testers and game designers do you know that moved into finance, media jobs, or architectural visualization (very much a niche industry). At least 75% of people working in the video game industry doing skilled and professional work can't easily transfer to a different field in the same way as an electrician cant move in to plumbing.

I know one in finance and one in arch viz. There are interviews of Bethesda artists looking for work on the side and quoting generous and lazy deadlines for the work. The customer is amazed they can do in two weeks what takes other people a month or more.

Games is not in a position of minimizing all risk. What industry is? If you want a safe job get into defense contracting. Go back to university and retrain like everybody else does.

It's baffling to see this attitude on Hackernews, famous for tech entrepreneurs who have more pivots in their career than a pirouetting ice skater.

Are comic books mainstream? They sold millions of copies, they are still a niche interest. Not until the Wii did games open up to a 'casual' market. With phones it's truly everywhere now.

Hacker News is not immune to the vicissitudes of society at large, and there is similar discontent against tech employers in non-game industry as well. There has been both sentiment in support of unionization at large tech megacorps like Google [0], and (non-union-related) sentiment against predatory startups that give misleading promises while forcing employees to assume both greater risk and lesser reward. [1] Not to mention there seems to be less hero worship of founders than there was in the past. [2]

There is a generalized dissatisfaction that the wealth generated by tech is not adequately being reached by its workers. Union advocacy is only a component of it. Tech might pay better than other industries, but its workers are just as affected by costs in housing and healthcare, just as everyone else.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923085

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868022

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973333

> The majority of bad sentiment has come in the past five years

Literally the first 3rd party gaming company was because workers were unsatisfied with Atari.

The key engineers who left Ferrari in '61 became the key engineers that lifted Lamborghini into existence. They didn't start a union and stepped away from deaths of Ferrari drivers and verbal abuse to start something new with Lamborghini. Both companies survived and no unions were started.

https://www.gptoday.net/en/news/f1/207607/history-ferrari-an...

Disgruntled employees are the birth of something new, not a call to clamp down.

Who is calling for tech & gaming unionization because of the first 3rd party gaming company? It's not the majority of bad sentiment. It's not even news.

Both Ferrari and Lamborghini are unionized. Indeed the financing that helped start Lamborghini in 1963 was contingent on there being a workers union.

I don't understand your point.

Lamborghini wouldn't exist had those five engineers unionized at Ferrari instead of leaving.

I was pointing out that the claim this sort of thing is new is complete and total bullshit.

Nobody claimed it was new. The majority of this is recent.

https://boards.fool.com/letter-from-an-ea-spouse-long-215884...

Not new. Not recent.

> Get rid of right to work statutes

I would not call taking away a worker’s right to work a benefit for a skilled worker.

"Right to work" is one of those legal principles that follows a dystopian naming scheme. It was lobbied for by the owner class because it allows freeloaders to benefit from collective bargaining without paying membership dues in the union representing them. This weakens the union, with the eventual goal of eliminating the union (and the benefits it negotiated for workers) altogether.

Your alternative puts workers in a straitjacket of having to belong to a union to work certain places. You say it's for their good. But all I see is the straitjacket.

And yet the alternative is not being allowed to work unless you donate money to extraordinarily political organizations who lobby for policies you may actively oppose.

Sorry, but I’m going to call the compelled speech option far more dystopian than right to work.

We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power. Unions can certainly do harm, and you are right that they shouldn't be seen as a pure and irreproachable force for good, but small anecdotes about individual bad decisions made by unions are not useful in discussions about this.

In fact, they play to the already ridiculously anti-union sentiment that the vast majority of Americans (this article is about America, apologies if you are foreign) hold.

Unions can go way too far, and they can do harm, but the overwhelming majority of Americans live so far away from that point that it's not even a fruitful discussion to be having.

This is a weird claim to make in the games industry. The vast amounts of cash Fortnite made for Epic is being poured back into buying up indie games and supplying a better store for game sales and creating a better game engine that anyone can pick up and use for 5% of sales. It is empowering the little guy way more than could be imagined in the past. Is that 100% of their revenue? No, but it is well above what anyone could hope for 10 years ago. You used to require hundreds of thousands of dollars in licenses to even see the tools used. People are getting good jobs training off these tools as we speak and releasing new innovative products.

I understand working conditions in the US sucks and I hold no bones about fixing them. The union is an infinite tool that will not stop at fixing engineering conditions. It has the ability to own the industry. That is not an outcome I want to see, I'd prefer to give 50% of my salary to whoever wants it than have a union tell me how to run what I do.

>The vast amounts of cash Fortnite made for Epic is being poured back into buying up indie games and supplying a better store for game sales and creating a better game engine that anyone can pick up and use for 5% of sales.

For the sole reason of trying to replace Steam as the dominant store platform on PC. Epic isn't just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. This will not continue once Epic achieves their goal of buying their way into being the middleman between developers and gamers.

They don't need to replace Steam, they have 80 million active users from Fortnite alone. Steam has 90 million active users.

Were they to compete with Steam properly they would crush Steam's store feature set. The Epic store is still under-developed compared to Steam by a lot. Regardless of their perceived intent the entire point is that the little guy is being rewarded and the system works even if it appears 'evil'.

So this is an argument for trickle-down economics within an industry, except used to rationalize fighting unionization, instead of increased taxation.

This is an argument that workers are supported. I make no grand economic philosophy claim.

> We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power.

No we don't, that is called slavery.

The definition of slavery changed over time. Be sure that salaried worker in a few centuries will be considered a mild form of slavery similar to indentured servitude, debt bondage or coloni's restriction of freedom under the Roman Empire.

"Were they forced to work? Yes and no. What happened if they decided not to work? Weeeeell... if they were rich, nothing. If they were poor, they would have died."

> Were they forced to work? Yes and no. What happened if they decided not to work? Weeeeell... if they were rich, nothing. If they were poor, they would have died

Hasn't that always been true of society, across all government models (or lack thereof)? At best, you don't have the rich that don't need to work... but what are the situations where the vast majority don't need to work (as far back as hunting/gathering).

Okay yes that's true. Within the bounds of modern capitalism we are at an extreme place.

> We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power.

The #1 problem in most cities is too many people are making too much money and it’s driving housing prices through the roof.

The demand for skilled labor is astronomical. I would not call that absolute extreme power of capital over labor.

Urban housing scarcity is mainly caused by speculation and corrupt zoning laws.

It's neither here nor there, but Oldman dodged a bullet by not participating in The Revenge of the Sith.

I see unions good for established low skill workers.

Grind the years and that will lead to sucesss. No innovation or additional learning needed. Just wait.

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