Major Union Launches Campaign To Organize Video Game, Tech Workers (latimes.com) 106
A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation's largest labor unions -- and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California -- aims to organize video game studios and tech offices to form or join a union. The Los Angeles Times reports: The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new project of the Communications Workers of America aimed specifically at unionizing video game and tech companies. It grew out of conversations between the CWA and Game Workers Unite, a grass-roots organization that sprang up in 2018 to push for wall-to-wall unionization of the $43-billion video game industry, alongside conversations with organizers across the larger tech industry.
The union declined to specify how much money it was putting behind the new effort, but has put two organizers on payroll to lead the push with support from dozens of CWA staff members across the country. One of the new staffers, Wes McEnany, comes from a more traditional labor organizing career with Boston-area unions and the labor-backed campaign for a $15 minimum wage. CWA also hired Emma Kinema, who co-founded Game Workers Unite and organized the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the group. The dedicated staff and national ambition set the CODE project apart from other efforts to organize tech workers, such as the United Steelworkers-backed Pittsburgh Assn. of Tech Professionals, which successfully unionized Google subcontractors in September. The organizers behind the new effort see the push for better working conditions and corporate ethics as one and the same. "The new project charts a path away from organizing video game workers along the Hollywood craft union model," the report adds. "SAG-AFTRA has represented video game voice actors for years, and called a strike in 2017 over pay and royalty structures. But CWA largely follows the industrial union model, which organizes entire companies at once rather than splitting workers who perform different jobs into specialized unions."
Slashdot reader sziring, who first brought the story to our attention, has raised the following questions/concerns: "If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella."
The union declined to specify how much money it was putting behind the new effort, but has put two organizers on payroll to lead the push with support from dozens of CWA staff members across the country. One of the new staffers, Wes McEnany, comes from a more traditional labor organizing career with Boston-area unions and the labor-backed campaign for a $15 minimum wage. CWA also hired Emma Kinema, who co-founded Game Workers Unite and organized the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the group. The dedicated staff and national ambition set the CODE project apart from other efforts to organize tech workers, such as the United Steelworkers-backed Pittsburgh Assn. of Tech Professionals, which successfully unionized Google subcontractors in September. The organizers behind the new effort see the push for better working conditions and corporate ethics as one and the same. "The new project charts a path away from organizing video game workers along the Hollywood craft union model," the report adds. "SAG-AFTRA has represented video game voice actors for years, and called a strike in 2017 over pay and royalty structures. But CWA largely follows the industrial union model, which organizes entire companies at once rather than splitting workers who perform different jobs into specialized unions."
Slashdot reader sziring, who first brought the story to our attention, has raised the following questions/concerns: "If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella."
Unions seem to work pretty well for doctors (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because there always seems to be a lot of people ranting that unions are for blue-collar plebes, it's worth pointing out that they also seem to work pretty well for doctors and engineers. A trade organization like isn't *exactly* the same thing as a union, but the difference seems to mainly lie in the details.
Re: Unions seem to work pretty well for doctors (Score:2)
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Trade organizations seem to be bent on keeping people outside of these organizations.
Look at the continuing stories of biased engineering qualifications and attacks against people who do engineering work but aren't in the engineers' trade organization.
The same with doctors. MD trade organizations keep foreign (especially refugees) doctors and other professionals from gaining certification in the USA and prac
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No, I support legal immigration in general*, but H1B allows abuse of workers. They can only stay if the company continues to employ them, and if they switch companies, they reset their progress towards a green card. That allows companies to underpay and overwork them. The abuse will translate across to American workers when managers start expecting it.
* Not purely altruistically. Highly paid workers also pay taxes.
Re: Unions seem to work pretty well for doctors (Score:1)
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A union is really nothing like professional organizations for doctors and engineers.
Professional organizations don't force the "last hired" to be the "first laid off". They don't negotiate wages so the worst employee and the best employee doing a job get the same pay regardless. They don't prevent members from working extra because they enjoy what they are doing or just can't put the problem down - even if they are not paid overtime. They don't go on strike effectively forcing members who are happy with the
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A trade organization like isn't *exactly* the same thing as a union
Considering doctors don't engage in collective bargaining, I'd say it's *nothing* like a union.
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Yeah I should have specified that I was referring to the U.S.
It makes more sense in Canada since you guys are single-payer. Doctor salaries are heavily influenced by what the government is willing to pay.
What stops jobs from getting off-shored? (Score:3)
Or get ready to train your H-1B replacement.
Re: What stops jobs from getting off-shored? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Clearly, SOMETHING is keeping tech jobs in the US...
The answer is obvious to anyone who has worked with an offshore group in Bangalore.
Americans are far more productive than Indians ... or Chinese, or Vietnamese, or Filipinos, etc. If you give the same dev job to a group in America and a group in India, the Americans will be done sooner with higher quality and more maintainable code.
If the cost of dev work in America exceeds the productivity difference, the jobs will flow overseas.
But the more immediate effect of tech unionization will likely be a flow of j
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If you give the same dev job to a group in America and a group in India, the Americans will be done sooner
No. On multiple pieces of work at multiple companies, no.
higher quality and more maintainable code
Yes. That's the reason I'll use the more expensive team.
It'll take longer because writing maintainable code takes longer. Unless you're measuring across a decade, in which case you still spend more time developing on the higher quality code base, but that's because you haven't written it off as an unmaintainable dead-end and started the migration away from it.
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higher quality and more maintainable code
Yes. That's the reason I'll use the more expensive team.
It'll take longer because writing maintainable code takes longer. Unless you're measuring across a decade, in which case you still spend more time developing on the higher quality code base, but that's because you haven't written it off as an unmaintainable dead-end and started the migration away from it.
I've made a good part of a career fixing the code that comes back from overseas, either when time comes to update the code base or to formally run the tests written for certification. The difference usually seems to be due to a quantity over quality perspective, and desire to follow the certification rules vs making more profit. When writing tests in particular, outsourcing tests will be written quickly, and if the test is complicated and can't be written quickly, important steps will be bypassed. We eve
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It's not productivity (Score:2)
First, the business people who hire these guys need to be able to look them in the eye. That's because they can't judge them on technical merit (they don't know how) but they _can_ read body language and spot when they're lying on a resume. Ever wonder why companies still pay for business travel in an age of cheap telecom? That's why. For whatever reason people who can read body language (which is generally not nerds, hen
Re:What stops jobs from getting off-shored? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a diminishing return on value for off shoring jobs and a lot of outright bad things that come with it.
One, code quality is typically really poor. It's a "you get what you paid for" kind of thing there.
Two, offshoring requires minimal complexity of task. Projects change, demands change, and so forth. All of that becomes really complicated to synchronize when those needing the orders and understanding of the task at hand are half way around the world and at best barely speak the language you conduct business in.
Three, if you have anything that requires security or IP, offshore is pretty much a no-go to start. Many places that are off shored to have very lax IP enforcement laws and even if they did, crossing international borders for a legal case is not very cost effective except in the most egregious breaches.
Four, quantifiable advantages of the talent being used is highly questionable. You may pay for a team of five to work on the project, but with zero verification, there's no telling that you actually have five people working on the project. Add in more complex KPI for coding review and it can become complicated to calculate true TOC for the project. That can make it more difficult to secure funding for future projects.
Five, while there are companies to help handle the situation, foreign taxes can begin to plague you if the company you are working with bows out. Navigating legal recourse for that can be a nightmare if you aren't prepared and that can create a major roadblock to your project's progress. Now I'll hang the caveat of the likelihood that you will have a project that a international broken will break contract is low, but if you start putting the entire company on foreign brokers, they very well might or decide that you're an easy target and start putting charges that add up fast.
Six, outsourced workers aren't going to aim for optimized work. You give them a task, they do it. If there's a better way forward and you didn't mention it, then you shouldn't expect it.
Seven, NDAs mean absolutely nothing with off shored work. So do not be surprised to see your code being used elsewhere, you design being leaked online, cheap competitors of your project, etc.
Offshore work has it's benefits, but they are few. The fact that the US legal framework works to the advantage of businesses is a massive boon to software projects. Additionally, having the work within the company means that the workers are a) within arms reach b) can be held accountable c) are vested with the company's growth and will be more incentivized to find more optimal processes. Again, there's definitely work that can be offshore, but anything you offshore comes with massive costs that while initially offshore is cheap, those costs can drive up the true ending price tag.
Case in point, a place I worked with wanted to have some XML document processing done by an offshore group. They indicate about a month of development before the initial code review. So for a full month they work in complete darkness. Month passes and the code comes in. We review it and it's the worse crap we've seen. A seven year old could have written it. The straw that broke the camel's back was a lookup that was done with nested loops that went five levels deep. The company decided to not go with them and pulls out. The service then pulls a contract and indicates that they are due a payment for the month at the very least. After dealing with that, the service indicates that we're in for the tax as well. Long story short, what was a failed month of coding and set all of us back, turned into three months of haggling with the service that drained resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. Now, I will say that before that we had okay service with the people, but this instance was just so bad, the company ditched them completely. Now the company could have eventually gone with another service, they're a dime a dozen. But they didn't, at least while I was there.
The thing is
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Two reasons I originally became a network engineer: It's insanely impractical to offshore, and hiring temp workers to do the job doesn't work well as it always takes time to learn the topology.
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Many of those off-shoring shortcomings can be overcome by a company establishing their own offshore development shops and hiring their own employees rather than going through a job shop. Small companies of course rarely find this to be an effective path to take, but once they have many hundreds of developers, it begins to become practical in some cases.
I've spent most of my career at startups and all of their attempts at offshoring (using job shops) were a disaster. During the few years I worked at large co
Don't underestimate the value (Score:2)
Ask yourself how well good code worked for Corel & Sun Microsystems. Both wrote _fantastic_ software. Now how well did blah code work for Microsoft?
Good enough is _always_ good enough.
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Now how well did blah code work for Microsoft?
Blah code didn't propel Microsoft ahead. The ability to manipulate their market position did that.
Good enough is _always_ good enough.
And you're absolutely correct all the way up until you're no longer correct. Good enough is always good enough until better comes along and then good enough isn't good enough anymore. You can think IE in this respects if you're so keen to MS products as an analogy in weak attempts to overly simplify complex topics. The idea that "good enough is always good enough" is the kind of argument that people who hav
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About time (Score:2)
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It would be nice to, say, be able to take an exam and become a licensed software engineer like one can with many other forms of engineering.
That's entirely different from a union, though.
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That will never happen with anything tech related. By the time the government gets around to having an updated exam, it's already old shit. It literally takes them years to do this. Industry certs are the only ones that can ever keep up because they're usually run by the same companies that are at the forefront.
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It seems like all they really need is collective bargaining to get more restrictions (or better compensation) for crunch time, which is pretty notorious in the game development industry.
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Honestly all the industry needs is collective bargaining to hire lawyers to enforce the law.
If you just enforced overtime wages and salaried employee abuses you would pretty much fix crunch time like *that*.
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I'm not in the gaming field so I can't speak to it (it does have a pretty horrible reputation), but I would hate to work somewhere that I was not salaried and got paid for overtime.
First, it would reduce my freedom to try things on my own even if it meant I worked more hours and sometimes seeing the result improve the product. Working overtime and being paid for it requires getting authorization to do so -- and then my time would have been spent, often fruitlessly, trying to get a project approved because p
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I like to goof around occasionally
Without presuming you do or don't mean using liquid oxygen on a barbecue, shooting colleagues with nerf guns or randomly creating an AI to generate customer support requests to test your system, one of the hardest things about managing technical people is understanding when they're goofing around with technology in a way that helps them in their work or whether they need redirecting back into a productive channel. Which may be goofing around on more appropriate technology instead.
(Yeah, I can't be arsed to
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If you just enforced overtime wages and salaried employee abuses you would pretty much fix crunch time like *that*.
The problem is that as a salaried employee, you're agreeing to those conditions for crunch...in your contract. If you're smart, you argue for hourly rate of pay, but you better bet your ass you'll have to show up on time, and put in a full day to cover your costs on employment. Or you argue for goal-oriented payment bonuses if you complete your work a head of schedule.
There's nothing inherently wrong with crunch either, what's wrong is that you have a top-end polish cycle that can last for months or somet
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I can't see how game developers need any kind of professional certification to perform what's largely a creative art.
That's because you think it's a creative art.
There's creativity and they do use artwork, but they should be getting artists to create that. The developers are craftsmen and engineers. They have structured approaches, standards that they follow, a body of knowledge and a level of rigour.
Even the bad ones.
That doesn't mean I necessarily support certification. I do support professionalisation though, turning all software engineering into a recognised profession with career options, ethics and protection from i
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Frankly, most developers are pretty bad at writing good code. I would know. It is my job to keep that shit running in production. Every place I have worked at, developers half-ass their code, improve it until it just barely passes QA, and then are shocked, SHOCKED I SAY!, that their code works like shit and is hard to troubleshoot because their idea of error handling and logging is, if one i
Ah, unions (Score:4, Insightful)
There are always fun jobs that pay little because everyone wants to do them, and hard jobs that pay a lot because few people are willing to put forth the effort. It doesn't seem very fair to me to have exclusive little clubs that you need to be a part of in order to work in an industry. It keeps out lots of people that want to work in the industry but can't (or don't want to) join the club.
I've seen this happen first-hand in the film and live entertainment industries. It's a joke-- all politics and money. And this sounds like exactly the same thing here.
In my time in the entertainment industry (about 15 years total as a professional), I found that union crews were always more expensive, slower, and had worse results than non-union crews. I can hardly wait to see what that looks like in the software industry. =/
There was a time and place for unions in history, but I don't think that place is in software.
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" In my time in the entertainment industry (about 15 years total as a professional), I found that union crews were always more expensive, slower, and had worse results than non-union crews. I can hardly wait to see what that looks like in the software industry. =/ "
I think the work-everyone-to-death-during-crunch-time-then-fire-everyone-after-launch will go away if they Unionize.
They don't have to go all Nazi with the Unions. Just standardize the pay, benefits and whatnot. Force the publishers to pay out
Re: Ah, unions (Score:2)
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I think the work-everyone-to-death-during-crunch-time-then-fire-everyone-after-launch will go away if they Unionize.
No.
It might move to Scotland, or Croatia, or Mexico, or maybe just to a different non-unionised subsidiary.
The alternative for the company will be shutting down anyway. If it was properly run and managing workload then it wouldn't be doing that level of crunch anyway.
Re: Ah, unions (Score:1)
Everything that can be offshored already has been offshored.
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I think the work-everyone-to-death-during-crunch-time-then-fire-everyone-after-launch will go away if they Unionize
GP just cited the film industry. What do you think happens during a production, and what happens when it's over? Have you ever noticed all those companies you've never heard of in the credits? That's the work-around. The industries always find a work-around. See also, "Hollywood accounting". Good-bye EA, Hello video games with "A Temporary Production Company Production" in the credits.
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You've described a positive correlation, in that pay reflects desirability - high desire to play baseball, high pay for those good enough.
However, it is fair to suggest that a lot of people want to be computer games programmers, so supply is high and wages are low. Very few people want to fix 40 year old COBOL mainframe systems running a bank, so supply is low and wages are at early retirement levels.
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Yes, a closed-shop employer is just another monopoly and that is always bad.
Technically, we should blame the employer for accepting such poor-work practices but, from the employer's perspective, half-arsed employees are better than zero income. Of course, once an employer admits it lacks leverage, the union will be more abusive.
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My experience is the opposite. Once the production staff for unionised things improved rapidly. Because we could talk to the union people about our needs and the staff were much more willing to bring issues to them we were able to better work together.
Arguably with the right manager that might have been possible another way, but it worked for us.
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The place for a union is any place someone is paid for work.
You're mixing Unions up with Guilds (Score:2)
Unions do need membership to be mandatory to work though. That's because once solidarity is broken the bargaining power falls apart.
Here's how you can tell Unions work, the 1% spend tens of millions of dollars on anti-Union propaganda. They are not doing that for the good of mankind. Go watch some anti-Union videos from Walmart. Go look
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Unions do need membership to be mandatory to work though. That's because once solidarity is broken the bargaining power falls apart.
Not really. You need a significant percentage of workers to go on strike, but 80% works as well as 100%. Especially in something like tech, where even losing one critical person can make the work grind to a stop. Even just working through Chirstmas and New Years when every other person you need is on vacation is nearly impossible. And since not all states / countries respect union labor laws, it'll push companies to move critical jobs to those jurisdictions. So you'll never get 100% coverage anyways.
The pro
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Unions do need membership to be mandatory to work though. That's because once solidarity is broken the bargaining power falls apart.
Nope.
I live in a country where "mandatory membership" or "union shops" do not exist (and would be illegal, but IANAL), but over 50% of workers are union members (Belgium with a population of about 11M, workforce of 4M, and 2M union members -- there are about 50M to 80M union members worldwide. Stats [oecd.org])
These are split over 3 national* unions which are connected to the "traditional" political parties (christian, socialist, and liberal).
There also exist some very small non-recognized** but influential
Good on them (Score:2)
Good on them. From what I hear the modern game industry is a real shit show to work in unless you're talented / lucky enough to land a spot at a small handful of AAA developers. I worked in the game industry in the early 2000's and it was a lot of fun but it was already changing and today I wouldn't touch most of that industry with a stick.
This is a terrible idea. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have experience in both working for a Fortune 500 tech company and working for the state of Washington Where I was forced to be part of a union in a tech role. Here are my experiences:
Working without a union:
1) You make your own career. If you stagnate, you're left behind and you get fired.
2) You have great flexibility in schedule.
3) Better pay. Don't have to pay for union.
Working with a union:
1) If persons are not motivated to improve you can't make them. What ever the contract says you have to do, and that's all. This locks in bad workers who don't care. You can take naps in front of your manager. You can tell you supervisor to f-off and you get a couple of days of payed leave and come right back. Also, you can't fire them for performance.
2) Due to union rules I have to schedule down to 15 minute increments for off time. I can't flex my schedule without doing going to HR and changing my schedule with them and having it approved by 2 levels of management. I have to justify working from home. So many levels of stupid....
3) Pay is lower and when I started 3% of my pay went to the union. This purchased me 1 visit from my union rep in 3 years. The visit was to tell me to give my 3% to the union or I couldn't keep the job.
There is so much more I could list. As you might guess, I'm not for unions. My experience of unions in tech is it's for lazy people who just want to punch a time card if you will. They have no interest in growing and learning which is what tech is.
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Re:This is a terrible idea. (Score:5, Informative)
I get the feeling that you've never worked in a healthy union environment. In regards to "working with a union".
1. Yes, you can fire for performance, but you have to show documented effort to train (remediate if necessary), properly escalate discipline, and then propose termination. The process is good. Implementation isn't always good because (and this is the MAJOR flaw), almost no one is trained to supervise or manage in a union environment. Supervisors must be **union competent supervisors**, but most supervisors today are working supervisors who don't have time to document progressive actions.
2. That's negotiated. The unions where I work define the option to take flex time, comp time, overtime, differentials, etc. Hell, where I work, the represented workers don't "ask" for vacation time-- they are empowered to say, "I'm taking next week off" and if they have the vacation hours for it and they gave 24 hours notice, that's it... unless their presence is an operational necessity.
3. 3% of your pay went to union dues? No way. Annual dues nationwide range from $300-$1,200 and they go so high mainly because fees are often progressive. And they're typically paid as X hours of work equivalent ("2 hours of work dues" @ $25/hour = $50 monthly dues) or in a flat rate, or they're capped when they're by percentage (3% of paycheck with a cap of $40).
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That's funny, because my ex-wife just paid $10k for her annual union dues.
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And how much does she make?
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Why does that matter? It should not cost $10k for what could be easily replaced by a Facebook group.
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If most others are performing, there's no sense in going through that bureaucracy. It's too much overhead that distracts managers and leads from their proper jobs and the incompetent ends up hanging around and polluting the environment for others for far too long. If someone needs excessive "training" to do their job as compared to others
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Perhaps you've never worked at a healthy non-union shop.
Bingo! This man gets it, almost.
There are crappy companies and crappy unions. Neither says much about good ones. Examples of more crappy ones doesn't really inform the discussion.
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I'm not debating that it's quicker in a non-union shop. I would expect it to be. I'm simply stating that union shops aren't as difficult to take action (let alone impossible) as the post suggests.
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Well you're correct on 1 account:
3) 3% union dues. I don't pay them now since the supreme court ruling says I don't have to. Funny thing is, I'm still in the union.
And yes 3% is correct.
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2) "You can take naps in front of your manager. You can tell you supervisor to f-off and you get a couple of days of payed leave and come right back. Also, you can't fire them for performance." Bull. Management just has to document and build a case. Sure you get a union rep to fight for your job if Management hasn't built a proper case agains
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I've worked at jobs where they time how long you take in the bathroom.
Ok, phone rep.
Oh go f**k yourself, you elitist corporate workaholic snob.
No, go fuck yourself, phone rep. There are people who punch a time card and do good work. There are also people who just want to punch a time card and fuck off. If you don't believe me, look at the US auto industry over the last 50 years.
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I've never worked in a union shop, but I only wish that when I've told my manager to f-off they would tell me to leave for a couple days with pay :) Usually they just argue for a while and, eventually, give up because they know I'm right and that I have a compelling argument that will fly with their boss. Fortunately, on the relatively few occasions I've had a manager that merited being told to f-off, they f
Working for a union does not preclude open source (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is not what the OP is talking about.
If this union controls all tech work, will it allow its workers to work for free doing tech work taking a second potential worker and paycheck out of the equation?
Other unions have decided to do just this and regulate when and how you can practice your craft, why would this one allow you to give away your work for free and potentially damage their bottom line?
Re: Working for a union does not preclude open sou (Score:2)
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Wait, so you went from: "that will never happen" to "OK, it will probably happen, but that is a good thing."
Re: Working for a union does not preclude open so (Score:2)
Union bad, but better than the corp that earns one (Score:5, Interesting)
So, businesses: If you don't want a union, don't do things that make a union necessary!
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No. You describe management as "overworking employees, infringing on personal life, failing to pay people what they've earned, and other deceptive practices". That sounds as if the us vs. them attitude started with management, and the union is just the employees organizing to fight back.
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Many people who come to a company after a union already exists complain about the us-vs-them attitude that the union encourages... and they're right... unions do encourage that division. What those people miss is that you are also correct: management created an us-vs-them attitude first. Then a union comes into existence and sustains that attitude. Instead of healing the rift, a union sustains that rift. If a business gets bad enough to
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A CEO of an airline parts manufacturer once told me, "The only businesses with unions are those that have done things to deserve having unions."
So, businesses: If you don't want a union, don't do things that make a union necessary!
One of the things I've observed is Government increasing the amount of tech legislation that dictates the behavior of technology professionals by coercion with fines and now jail terms. The first of these laws were passed in Australia.
So whilst you have a valid point those tech companies have always known the type of power that technology professionals possess as a whole and have used that to promote their interests over that of the community. As a result government has noticed and all around the worl
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Or if you're an employee and can do better elsewhere, leave. The employer that abuses good workers will likely decline and may go out of business - their loss, the employee should only see it in their rear-view mirror. What is so hard about this?
A job in our industry is generally fairly short term - ten years is a long time in most cases. This is good, moving from company to company exposes the employee to more variety, different ways of doing things, different perspectives, different technologies -- anyone
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Businesses always do things that require Unions (Score:2)
Yes, in any business there are employees so important that they must be coddled. But outside of tech Unicorns like Google they're a handful of employees (and the reason those tech companies are Unicorns is that they can generate crazy profits with minimal numbers of employees).
What I'm saying is this: No man is an i
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"They do encourage an us-vs-them attitude with management."
But we do need this and don't realize it. It doesn't have to be open hostility between labor and management, just an understanding that both groups' goals are at odds with each other. Companies have spent decades trying to convince ordinary workers that we're all on the same side, all working towards the same goal, and we're all friends here. I disagree. Labor is trying to eke out a living in an environment of stagnant wages and fierce wage compress
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I think you would be surprised how much marketing can force bad counterproductive choices. At the end of the day their are billions of dollars on the line, we are talking way north of $100 billion dollar industry, and it seems the average union due is north of 6%. They could afford to wine and dine every tech worker with $10K in gifts and bribes. They could promise to bump their paychecks themselves by 8% for the 10 years, writing off making anything on anyone planning on retiring in the next 15 years, but
Open source does not mean you work for free (Score:4, Interesting)
If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella.
Open source is a distribution model. Not a payment model. You can be paid to write open source code, case in point RedHat. Some may confuse the two because typically we've seen open source mean people writing code in their free time, but code contributions also come from companies and the number of companies contributing to open source has increased over the years.
In short, open source and reimbursement for work aren't a 1:1 relationship. You can work for free and write closed source code. You can work for free and write open source code. You can work for an income and write closed source code. You can work for an income and write open source code. One isn't irrevocably linked to the other.
Now that doesn't indicate how unions will feel about open source, but seeing how a multitude of companies already have open source software very intractably entwined with their business software, its doubtful that any union would gain sway on the notion that the very core of what a lot of people work with is contravene to where the union wants to take them.
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I don't think that's what they were asking about. If you're a programmer at a unionized company, will you be allowed to contribute to open source projects in your free time? Or would the union see that as "doing work for free" and say you can't?
Hopefully the people forming the unions and negotiating the contracts will make sure this isn't a problem. But you can see how it could be a problem if someone doesn't raise the issue while the rules are still being set.
Us needs better workers rights! (Score:2)
Us needs better workers rights!
SoCal union results (Score:2)
We need a different model (Score:2)
That said, some places are flat out shit to work for. I've worked for a few.
My solution? Get another job. If the place I'm working at sucks ass, then I had the skills to get another job.
My biggest gripe with unions is you're just a cog in the wheel. There is 0 incentive to go above and beyond, your pay and benefits will be exactly
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Controlling the scumbags (Score:1)
Re: Controlling the scumbags (Score:1)
The same way we control the scumbag, criminal, bribe-taking, pension-skimming scumbag corporate officials?
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Add VFX workers as well (Score:2)
There is not a VFX union and as a result artists and tech staff in that industry are regularly taken advantage of.
Good idea but... (Score:2)
I'd be in favor of this happening. If it were organized around the guild model, then all the prima donna rockstar 10x-ers crying about equality with other workers would be able to negotiate their own rockstar salaries while maintaining the same baseline level of rights. SAG members are guaranteed union scale and rights to royalites, etc. as a bare minimum, all while its celebrity members are buying their 17th house and third yacht in between movie deals. Since video games are technically entertainment it's
Open source is a red herring (Score:2)
Unions in many areas allow for volunteer work or even experimental work. For example many small shoestring filmmakers can hire union actors and craftsman at under wages under an experimental contract. They still have to do certain things like cap work hours and ensure health and safety. But they can pay below scale with a provision if the film is a huge success the actors get paid part of the profits to balance out the lower wages.
There is more than one way to do it.
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ERr...Big fucking deal.
I mean, who in the IT market, especially in the video game world in CA is making less that $15/hr?!!?
You know, if you don't know your worth, or aren't worth very much...you're not going to do well.
If you do, then learn the ancient art of negotiating for your salary or bill rate..
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I mean, who in the IT market, especially in the video game world in CA is making less that $15/hr?!!?
Testers? Story/dialogue writers? Voice actors? Certainly the community support team.
Re: it's about time, people need to organize .. (Score:1)
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For being way smarter than us, I am still waiting for you to come up with one original thought of your own...
Ok, I'll take a shot at this, it's not that hard, how about people stop working for their pointy hair bosses and start their own non-profit code shop writing small custom on demand scripts and software for average individuals and small companies as part of a self financing network based on an IP shared blockchain ownership basis, committed code is the blockchain and code requests get voted up from a common pool democratically selected by the public user base?
If democracy is so grand, why aren't our workplac
Re: it's about time, people need to organize .. (Score:5, Insightful)
The classical trick of slavers and dictators everywhere, blame the people for not being "strong enough", while they ofcourse are allowed to indulge whatever decadence they wish.
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Re: it's about time, people need to organize .. (Score:1)
Get off my lawn!
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The reason you fuckers are in debt is because you waste your money.You don't want to build your life. You want to buy all the things, most of which will replaced in a year or two because New THINGS, on credit and then cry because you have to pay the bills.
Who are you talking to? I have no debt and I'm an old man. It's worth mentioning though that I didn't spend much money during my youth as well since I had a very cheap hobby: fucking libertarian men's girlfriends while they were hard at work, saving money for computer games and gadgets.
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Most people are in debt because of medical bills, mortgages, student loans, and cars. Most of that s lumped under consumer debt which is a misnomer as transportation and homes are very different than video games and pasta makers.
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At this point Tech workers are the few upward mobile middle class jobs. The demand for our services has given us competitive pay and benefits.
If your current job has problems look elsewhere there are a lot of tech jobs out there. Perhaps in sectors that you haven’t considered.
You get a job in a software shop. You are going to be coding crap code every day. You could go to other sectors government, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture... and you may have a job using your tech skills doing somet