Videogame Studio Called 'Proletariat' Declines to Recognize Union (msn.com) 59
An anonymous reader shares a report from the Washington Post:
Staff at Activision Blizzard-owned video game studio Proletariat — whose name is a term for the working class — announced their intention to form a union in December of last year. "Well, what'd you expect?" the Proletariat Workers Alliance wrote on Twitter at the time. Earlier this week, however, Proletariat leadership shared an update: Instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, it will conduct an anonymous vote through the National Labor Relations Board.
Proletariat owner Activision Blizzard has been accused of employing union-busting tactics in its negotiations with two other subsidiaries that have voted to unionize, Raven Software and Blizzard Albany.
Proletariat owner Activision Blizzard has been accused of employing union-busting tactics in its negotiations with two other subsidiaries that have voted to unionize, Raven Software and Blizzard Albany.
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, "Activision has been accused of..." is meaningless. Anybody can accuse anybody of anything, so what.
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Hooo boy...First, proletariat does not mean that. Second, what exactly is "the working class" aside from those who...work...which is basically everybody? Third, just about every way you can answer that second question to only include a certain subset of the population that works for a living likely does not include anybody who works for a game development studio.
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Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
If it's really that easy, and the management really does nothing, then all they have to do is leave and then work on their own. Why not do that instead of joining a union, which takes money from them without also doing anything that fits within your definition of work.
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
So get a business loan. Or investors. Or both. Or Kickstarter. I know of a several indie game developers that started this way, though I can't think of any that don't have managers.
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
Ah I'm obviously talking to somebody with zero understanding of how to form a business. It must suck to be you, never getting ahead in life and always convincing yourself that you're never the one to blame.
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
A co-op operates the same way as any other business, only really differing in terms of ownership structure. And actually in terms of benefiting from the equity of the business, I guarantee you I'm doing far better than you are in that regard. My ownership stake isn't fixed, and indeed it grows over time. And because you aren't required to be an employee to own a stake in it (though it's very hard to if you're not an employee) that means that as the company grows in value, (which it is, very quickly at that)
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
Well basically everybody here does. Part of the compensation package for all full-time employees is company shares. And nearly all employees are full-time, including food service, security guards, maintenance, etc.
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if management went away the product could still get made.
Can you provide a list of products made by companies without managers?
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Will you pay for that list? If not, go and compile it yourself, you scrounger.
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
That's a pretty lousy cop out. The person he replied to effectively claimed that management does nothing. If that's the case, it should be really easy for those employees to form a new company with no managers so they can make more on their own. Basically the wet dream of every person who routinely uses the phrase "working class". But here they're not doing that, instead they're forming a union, which actually adds more management overhead. By his own definition, the people who run the union also aren't par
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Can you provide a list of products made by companies without managers?
There are plenty of such companies you just have to count really small ones. There are also quite a few companies founded by people who got sick of their management at a company they worked for and left to start their own. Of course, they generally become the management at their new company.
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Hooo boy...First, proletariat does not mean that.
Well, actually it kinda does...
"The proletariat is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labor power. A member of such a class is a proletarian."
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
No, it doesn't. And you plagiarized that from a particularly badly written Wikipedia article.
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Definitions from Oxford Languages:
proletariat /prltert/
noun: proletariat; plural noun: proletariats; noun: proletariate; plural noun: proletariates
workers or working-class people, regarded collectively (often used with reference to Marxism).
"the growth of the industrial proletariat"
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
You picked a better source there, but it's still way off the mark. Marx, despite his famously bad interpretation of history (starting with his idea that private property is somehow a new thing) even specifically labeled proletariat as being distinct from the "working class". Proletariat, a latin term, literally refers to the lowest class of Roman society. Actually Britannica provides a good summary:
https://www.britannica.com/top... [britannica.com]
It's pretty remarkable how little you guys understand your own ideology. Even
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Proletariat is favored terminology among Marxists. As we all know, Marxist regimes don't like independent unions.
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Right. For libertidiots like you, you replace the word with "consumer", implying someone who doesn't work, but sits in front of a tv all day, with their wallet connected to your bank account.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the time, that is exactly what it means. I know you get a lot of propaganda that all unions are evil and all employers are good saintly people, but in the real world a union forms for precisely the reason to empower workers.
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It feels a bit like learned helplessness. "I can't do anything about my exploitative company!" got turned into "I can't do anything about my embezzling union".
And yes, you can do something against both. But when you look at the "land of the free", where personal responsibility is ostensibly a hallmark of the population, you'll find that it's anything but. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. Everyone just wants someone to blame for how bad their life is. It's the $political_party. It's the $eth
Re: I don't get it (Score:1)
I suppose I could uproot my family and move to a right to work state, and if it comes to that I might.
For now I'll bide my time in my non unionized white collar job and hope that for the near term, 50% plus one of my coworkers won't see fit to unionize and pick my pocket in the name of some supposed class war dreamed up on the other side of the planet several centuries ago.
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Unions in the US do seem to have a bit of an issue with being too mercenary and too singularly concerned with their vested members rather than workers in general. Many union shops frankly make the work pretty undesirable for entry level employees. They basically have to work their way up to being actual members of the union while paying union dues and only then will the union actually look out for them. In many respects, it sometimes seems like workers who are not part of the union or not yet part of the un
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STFU. All you know i is propaganda. Show me where a union is "padding it's pockets."
FACT: a few years back - I think it was '12, I was fed up with morons and suckers like you, and I did something not one "journalist" or idiot has ever done: I went to the IRS website, and looked it up, with help from a staffer.
There were about 6600 "labor organizations" (not all are unions). Total wealth for ALL OF THEM TOGETHER was $28B.
What's Apple, by itself, have in cash reserves - over $100B? Your idol, Rupert Murdoch's
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It does over here.
Get better unions.
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Indeed, it's incredibly inaccurate to say "staff [...] announced their intention to form a union in December of last year".
The whole process of intending to form a union involves a vote of a majority of the employees. The union (and its leadership) derives its right to negotiate on behalf of workers by virtue of the support of that majority and management is required to accept that vote as dispositive.
But until that happens, there's no one "announcing" anything because there is no endorsed leadership. The f
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
Exactly.
An anonymous reader shares a report from the Washington Post: Staff at Activision Blizzard-owned video game studio Proletariat â" whose name is a term for the working class â" announced their intention to form a union in December of last year. "Well, what'd you expect?" the Proletariat Workers Alliance wrote on Twitter at the time.
So a group of employees created a press release, that's supposed to be binding? How many/what percentage want to join a union?
Earlier this week, however, Proletariat leadership shared an update: Instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, it will conduct an anonymous vote through the National Labor Relations Board.
Isn't that how it's supposed to be? Do we unionize workplaces by a show of hands in the break room? Just assume everyone is onboard when the subject comes up and just unionize?
There really is nothing her to get excited about, based on my reading of the story...
The Irony must be lost (Score:4, Funny)
A company called Proletariat doesn't recognize the workers' rights to organize and hopes the NLRB can save them? They should call themselves "Sweatshop."
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Somebody misunderstood one of [wikipedia.org] the key phrases of Marxist theory -- instead of "dictatorship of the proletariat", they thought they were supposed to establish "dictatorship of Proletariat".
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Looking around, with parties appealing more and more to the basest instincts and the lowest common denominator, what our democracies descend into is more a dictatorship of the proles.
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A company called Proletariat doesn't recognize the workers' rights to organize and hopes the NLRB can save them? They should call themselves "Sweatshop."
Lumpenproletariat to keep it in style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] opportunistically quoted:
Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy.
If there aren't stickers to correct that logo by this point I don't think they're trying hard enough.
Re: The Irony must be lost (Score:2)
Out of the what, 57 employees, how many want to unionize? We're not told - we're told that an INTENTION to unionize was ANNOUNCED... so what? An NLRB-supervised anonymous vote is the way to go.
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Digging into it, while the union is claiming to represent a supermajority of the workers, the workers themselves are saying that this announcement caught them by surprise and that they haven't even signed union cards, and we know there hasn't been a unionization vote yet. In other words, there *is* no union yet, and the employer is perfectly within their rights to basically say "come back to us when you've actually formed a union that represents a majority of the workers". That's a far cry from not recogniz
Irony died with the Orange One (Score:2)
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"Andrew Tate is going down, and this time it won't be on a 16-year old. "
-Abraham Lincoln
Unpopular opinion is unpopular (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll go ahead and say it -- I have the karma for it, after all...
Company with conveniently sounding anti-worker name (lets disregard it was originally established with that name with tongue-in-cheek humor) performs the usual response to an employee unionization push by engaging the NLRB to help coordinate a fair and well run vote.
Shocking stuff going on here. Honestly. Someone call Moped Jesus, he clearly needs to detour immediately to help address this travesty.
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Are you saying 'proletariat' is an anti-worker name? That is the opposite of my interpretation
Shouldn't there be a neutral vote? (Score:1)
If there was a non-sucky tech union (Score:2)
I would consider joining it. For example they could negotiate to:
But now, current unions can be
Only Union advocates... (Score:2)
...could characterize a "democratic secret ballot" as somehow anti-worker. LOL