Activision threatened, spied on workers amid union drive, U.S. agency says | Hacker News Reader

Activision threatened, spied on workers amid union drive, U.S. agency says

reuters.com

121 pointspseudolus32 comments

Two questions…

What’s fundamentally so threatening to corporate interests that Activision like the early robber barons engage in such tactics to prevent collective bargaining by employees?

Do worker protections result in lower shareholder value OR does the c-suite just hate the idea the idea of rank-and-file employees having the power to disagree without being fired?

First Q: They do it because it’s harder to exploit a unionized workforce. Exploitation leads to short term increase in shareholder value.

Second Q: Probably both.

> "Exploitation leads to short term increase in shareholder value."

… and the sad truth is that to the corporate or political mind (is there even any difference between the two anymore?) the short term is the only timeframe of any importance at all.

"The only revenue that matters is the quarterly one."

Something I've taken to heart from business school. Since most senior leadership roles have a Short Term Incentive attached to their KPI, it makes perfect sense for them to make the most informed decision to maximise their return.

Is there any way to change this short-term-ism?

It also prevents a meritocracy. Surely that’s not the driving force for these companies to dismiss unions, but it’d be a reason for me. I’m not promoting idiots just because they’ve been idiots here a long time.

It is so tragic that in US unions get accused to prevent meritocracy.

In Europe we do just fine with them.

There's a lot I disagree with here:

1. Non-union shops aren't meritocracies. The most "meritous" employees are also the kinds of employees that will work for table scraps and the "privilege" of doing what they do. Those folk make up the lower half of any org's tree. That's just good economics, try to argue otherwise to your shareholders and you'll get laughed out pretty quickly.

It's the folk whose main motivation is their paycheck and/or the power trip they get from pushing around folk who make up the upper half. There are just far too many obstacles and disinsentives to climb that ladder barring those motivations.

2. Everyone wants a meritocracy until they get one. Meritocracies make for terrible work environments for 90% of people in the org. It becomes a tyranny of those willing to perform metrics-hacking or win the "sleeping-at-work" olympics.

I'm not saying unions don't have their problems, but the idea that they are bad because they eliminate some intrinsically good meritocray that inevitably forms in their absence is among the worst arguments you can make imho.

How would it prevent meritrocacy? Does being a union member automatically grant people promotions in function of time at company?

Surely that's not a law of physics, you can have unions without automatic promotions, which I agree are not good, usually.

"Meritocracy" is like "utopia": something to strive for, but in reality a myth.

The idea that unions stand in the way of meritocracy is absurd. And of course we are ignoring that there is no objectively correct definition of what is meritable in a corporate context. Many many companies have died after doing very well to optimize their particular brand of merit.

Unions don't have to give special benefits based on tenure either. The industries where that is a a feature of unions happen to be places where it makes sense, i.e. without significant benefits for tenure nobody would ever work for somebody like UPS in the first place because you would be destroying your body for no long term payoff and not making any more money in the short term vs. easier positions that are just as easy to get. A company like UPS, if it were to crack down on unions in an attempt to enforce a "meritocracy", would very quickly cease to exist.

In the context of software development, a union would probably be much more recognizable if branded as a kind of professional association. We all know the kinds of security concerns and awful code that get pushed out because of a poor definition of "merit" on the part of companies. Unions are primarily a way for people that are most able to determine what is meritorious to actually have some influence on the definition of merit in their organization.

But self exploiting workers will self exploit with unions or without. I know 60h working people in germanys factories with unions. This does not hold up to scrutiny.

Activision already has a hard enough time getting out of its own way. Can you imagine how ridiculous things would get if it had a UAW style union?

I'm not saying the games industry isn't terrible, its probably one of the worst industries to work in. I don't think unions in the games industry would change a damn thing except reducing net efficiency, adding 1-2 years to every dev cycle without much gain for really anyone.

Counterpoint: I am pretty sure unions would change "a damn thing" in the gaming, because that is what I can assume by looking at what unions achieved elsewhere.

Yeah, like what the achieved in public schools, or police forces and blue wall, or American auto industry... not quite a union but AMA has also achieved a lot for US doctor pay vs the rest of the world. American West Coast port efficiency is also the laughing stock of the world, thanks in no small part to unions. And feather bedded and/or mafia-run infrastructure costs in places like New York.. oh yeah, I'm forgetting the glorious history of unions! That's where it really is, like explicitly racist exclusion during the Great Migration, or volunteer patrols Cesar Chavez used to run to intimidate undocumented immigrants with violence and bribe officials to look the other way.

I personally think, with the exception of those explicitly dedicated to violence or war, American-style unions are the most evil organizations on the planet. If someone paid me to invent a social structure with worse all-around incentives, I probably couldn't do it.

I am not an American and I profit from unions over here even if I am not a member of them.

If your unions turn out to be evil, then organize them differently. What will however not work is hoping that governments and industries will protect the rights of employees and workers without them somehow organizing.

This is a rather vague statement... Protecting the rights sounds noble but I'd look at the whole package. Workers are doing very well in industries like tech with ~0 unions. American auto workers are doing worse than they used to because they made their industry long-term uncompetitive for a short-run benefits.

Police and teacher unions are great for their members (protecting the incompetents, make-work); so are guilds like AMA (artificially limiting the supply of doctors, including qualified immigrants) but terrible for society.

The general pattern is that unions are parasites, so they can only go 2 ways - they can make the host weaker or kill it off; or if the host itself has captive audience (e.g. taxpayers) they just make it worse for everyone on average, while transfering some of the remaining reduced pie to their members. Note how much teacher unions hate private and charter schools - they really don't want people to be able to escape the system, it would interfere with milking the taxpayers with nothing to show for it.

"except reducing net efficiency"

did you mean reducing unpaid overtime and crunch mode death marches?

If dev cycles are increased by a year or two AND wages go up, they will hire a lot less people. Revenue will tank and overhead will skyrocket.

“Our quarterly profits depend on burning out our workers and forcing them into unpaid overtime” is not the argument you think it is.

The cost to deliver your product with employees that work 40 hr weeks, normal PTO, and limiting your “crunch” to 2-3 sprints a year is the cost of doing business.

Except it is. You're only considering this from a union PoV. Corporations are not endless pits of wealth extraction waiting to be tapped by a union, you have to consider what the consequences would be outside of the aspiring utopian objectives.

What does the games industry look like if it takes 1-2 more years to create the same products and with significantly less people?

Where do all the formerly employed QA testers, developers, project managers, etc. go? Start their own business? With what capital? Do they have to pay union rates and fees too? If so, how would it not be somewhere around 5 years before they can make a game? Thats an unsustainable model for anyone but the largest most profitable corps.

> What does the games industry look like if it takes 1-2 more years to create the same products

Healthier. An industry where people can work for a career instead of a 3-5 year stint in their 20s and then quit for something resembling a sane work life balance.

We have to take a step back here. If the games industry can’t exist without mountains of unpaid labor then we already can’t afford it. The idea that devs and artists should apparently just volunteer the extra 40 hours for the benefit of daddy corporate is insane. And the fact that one of the only paths to getting paid fairly is forming a union is total failure of our existing labor laws. Something something wage theft outweighs all other theft combined.

These kinds of things don’t and shouldn’t need a union but it’s the only tool available when your government fails you (or let’s be honest captured by corporate interests). I guaran-fucking-tee you that eliminating the overtime exemption would overnight kill the desire to these workers to unionize.

I don't know if it's the same in the U.S but here (Israel) unionizing means two massive competitive disadvantages for companies:

1. Inability to fire low performers quickly (and often times at all)

2. Inability to reward monetarily high performers (or offer competitive pay)

That's a hell of a handicap for companies to accept without a fight.

It is the same in India as well. It has been established that removal of unionised resources can pose an exceptional challenge, which may result in monetary and potential reputation loss for the company.

It's not about low performers, but workers who complain about mistreatment. There is usually nothing preventing unionized companies for offering higher pay for high performers, but sometimes they use the union agreements (which ask for wage adjustments well below inflation the inflation rate at the moment) as an excuse not to offer higher wages.

A game company might not like unions because it would harder to retaliate against workers protesting against illegal "crunch" time. Just an example.

In Germany, those things aren't tied to unions, and even people that aren't part of a union do have the right to proper work laws.

Is it really a disadvantage to be forced to clearly define the expectations for the workers? "Low performers" are easy enough to fire, even with unions, as long as management actually does their job and documents repeated missing expectations. But I guess the inability to fire at will is what the company is complaining about. By not being required to clearly state expectations, management can move the goal posts at will, exploit workers and then fire them for not meeting informed expectations.

Yeah, it’s not like non-unionized enterprises make it easy to fire workers. There’s evidence collection, meetings with HR, PIPs even when it’s at will.

I suspect the answer to the second question is "both, plus the fear that unionization might spread and show the proles that they actually have the power to turn things back in their favor, and end the gravy train that has let the already-wealthy take nearly all the increases in productivity for 50 years to line their pockets."

I think there's a programmed gut reaction to "unions" above and beyond any rational or cynical self-interest. It's endemic in American culture and especially American business culture.

We need to change this, and remake American capitalism in Germany's model, where workers have representation at the board level.

What I'm curious about is: what stops workers from stepping out and doing their own enterprise?

In the case of an industry that makes physical products this is not feasible. E.g.: for a shoe factory, the reason is clear: the factory owner owns the infrastructure and machines (e.g.: the means of production). So workers wanting to step out and do their own thing are lacking all the machines and infrastructure to do the job: it's not that simple.

But when it comes to software, that's not so much the case. The equipment is mostly computers which (I hope) employees of Blizzard can afford to buy. The means of production in this case are the employees themselves and their talent. Sure, they'd have to start from scratch on a new game, but if you have all the talent, there's not much more than you need.

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