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?
Second Q: Probably both.
… 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.
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.
In Europe we do just fine with them.
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.
Surely that's not a law of physics, you can have unions without automatic promotions, which I agree are not good, usually.
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.
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.
A game company might not like unions because it would harder to retaliate against workers protesting against illegal "crunch" time. Just an example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
did you mean reducing unpaid overtime and crunch mode death marches?
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.
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.
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.