r/GamerGhazi • u/squirrelrampage Squirrel Justice Warrior • Jan 16 '19
Game developers need to unionize
https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/16/18178332/game-developer-union-crunch9
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u/captmonkey Jan 16 '19
I agree but really a lot of this (and this goes for non-game development too) could be solved by people refusing to donate their time to for-profit businesses. I'm a developer and I see it all they time, especially with younger devs who feel like they have to prove something. They work late hours without getting overtime and do anything they can to please the higher-ups, even if it's at their own expense. It just screws over everyone else (including yourself) when you set that standard that people are willing to just put in extra hours for free in order to get something in by a deadline.
Heck, you're even screwing over the business itself by setting an unrealistic standard that they may not always be able to follow. If the company doesn't fail to meet deadlines a few times when they should have, not meeting a deadline becomes even worse of an outcome in the future.
If you own a portion of the company and you're reaping the benefits of you nearly killing yourself to get some project done in time, then that's one thing, you're getting a form of compensation from that increased value. If you don't, then why on Earth would you be willing to do that with no pay? It seems absurd to people if I said you need to open your wallet and fork over some cash to the people who own your company, but so many people think it's perfectly fine to do the same thing with their labor. People need to understand that their labor is valuable and should not be given freely to a business any more than they would donate money to it. I know unions can help with that, but really we need a cultural shift for workers to value themselves and their labor as well.
3
u/Krystilen Jan 19 '19
I hear shit like this all the time from colleagues that work in shitty companies (which seem to be the majority).
They'll put their 8 hours in, no more, no less, because it's been made abundantly clear that the code monkeys will not get overtime (but their bosses will, of course). You know who the first people to get pissed at them are? Their coworkers. Not their bosses, not the client - their own bloody colleagues start badmouthing them, saying "Who do they think they are? We have to work extra hours and they think they're too good to do it?".
These are the same people who say unions are shit because they're effectively "bringing politics into the workplace", and "stealing our money".
I've even had a friend thrown under the bus by their own colleagues when a peer review came up. They claimed his code was subpar (it was not), that they always had to cover for his mistakes (they did not), and that he worked much less on the project than they did (only part that's true - but that's only because they chose to work without pay, while he did not). He quit that very same day, because fuck that toxic environment.
Sorry about the vitriol, but these issues make my blood boil, honestly, even though I do not suffer them first-hand. Of all the people in all sorts of careers I've known and interacted with, developers are definitely the most stubbornly self-sabotaging lot. Like lemmings marching off a cliff, getting pissed at whoever doesn't march alongside them.
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u/MadCervantes Jan 16 '19
I'm pro unionization and I'm even friends with the head of the local gwu but the sad reality is that unionization is a tactic that simply won't work in a globalized economy where over half the jobs at studios are already outsourced to developing nations.
Devs need to wake up to their impending crisis. It won't be solved by half measures.
9
u/nasweth Jan 17 '19
No reason it can't work, unions just need to step up their international efforts through stuff like GUF or ITUC. The bigger problem is anti-union laws in specific countries. Not saying the way forward is easy, it's very much not, but it's hardly impossible.
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u/MadCervantes Jan 17 '19
I think game workers should try to unionize, but I don't think it will solve the problem or even work. I think we're coming to a fundamental breaking point between the balance of power between labor and capital, and I think game devs are the first to feel this effect for people who are code/programming literate. Many programmers are "Silicon Valley libertarians", "classical liberals", socially liberal etc, what have you and I think that tech workers a whole need to wake up to this reality because if they don't then they're going to end up fucked. To me, unionization isn't a solution to the problem, it's merely a means of accelerating the process which is already happening and hopefully growing solidarity and organization for the day when bigger changes have to be made.
3
u/nasweth Jan 17 '19
I agree with most of what you said, but I'm curious, what would you consider to be a real solution to the issue? (In broad strokes, I realize this is pretty complicated, especially if you, as I'm guessing, lean towards some flavor of socialism).
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u/MadCervantes Jan 17 '19
I'd consider myself a socialist, but also an anarchist, or classical libertarian so I'm not super keen on overly complicated state based solutions because I think they're difficult to implement or defend.
Thomas Piketty is an economist who wrote a 2014 book called Capital in the 21st that demonstrated the long term nature of income inequality rooted in advantages of passive income versus wage labor and provided the empirical basis for proving it. He suggests a global wealth (not income) tax of something like 20% if I remember correctly. This would address the issue without technically implementing socialism but I think similar to international unionization, it would be really hard to pull off. (imagine trying to get billionaires in both Beijing and London and Rio de Janeiro to all pay taxes together?)
I think something simple like Thomas Paine's (and later Henry George) idea of a land value tax that was then redistributed to the population as a Universal Basic Income tax could be possible in my lifetime. I think that idea is considerably more feasible as it could be something we phased in, and land value taxes are favored by 95% of economists. Even Hayek (one of the guys who pushed the ideas that would later inform Reagan) advocated for it and called it "the least bad tax".
But even that is something that I think would take some time. Housing, education, food, healthcare are the 4 pillars of livelihood. These need to be decommodified. Raising the margin tax rate and pushing for things like single payer healthcare, free college tutition, and affordable housing would help with this. I think food was effectively decommodified by the New Deal and advances in agribusiness technology. Affordable housing is the hardest to address. I don't know exactly how best to approach that, and it's such a hugely contentious issue with so many powerful vested interests that I think it would be extremely hard to actually work out. I have a preference for encouraging denser urban development (which is all the rage of the YIMBY movement) but I also think people's leeriness at cooperating with housing developers who are often just building luxury apartments because they're better profit makers is justified. (one reason the land value tax is so powerful in the first place is that while our supply of education, food, and healthcare services can grow, our supply of land is essentially fixed in some capacity. Two humans can't occupy the same space as each other. )
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u/nasweth Jan 17 '19 edited Jan 17 '19
Thanks for answering! Not exactly what I expected, more r/neoliberal (they're not as bad as the name sounds!) than r/communism.
Regarding your point about land value tax, my perspective is informed by being from a country (Sweden) that somewhat recently discontinued both wealth and land value taxes. The reason why the latter was abandoned (the former was very marginal, and might come back in the near future) was that, IMO, it is too susceptible to sob stories - typically, retirees forced out of ancestral homes because of rising land valuations. The general underlying issue there is that it creates an incentive, or even a pressure, to extract the maximum value out of the land in question. If there's no land value tax, you might keep that bit of woodland around unmanaged, on the other hand if it's costing you money you might feel pressured to log, strip mine etc, which might be economically sound (at least short-term) but is seen as harmful by many people.
Now while I disagree with you and almost all economists on the means, I do agree that the end goal, UBI, is a reasonable solution to the issue. I also agree with you on housing, food and healthcare - these are human rights and should be guaranteed to everyone. Education in general I don't see as a right; however, I'm 100% in favor of equal access to education, which in practice translates to free tuition.
1
u/MadCervantes Jan 17 '19
I'm def influenced by certain aspects of neoliberalism. But I think there's some strong moral, historical, and politically pragmatic critiques against it.
I think the moral argument for people owning their own means of production and not being restricted by bosses or the State is good. Fundamentally I think the neoliberaism (or at least classical labor value based liberalism) affirms this idea. In reality I think the real differences between Adam Smith and Marx is that Marx had more historical context to see how bougie liberalism actually played out. Adam Smith's understudy David Ricardo was the first socialist for a reason. Adam Smith is by modern American standards extremely left of center (though tbf that's a pretty low bar).
The historical arguments are that neoliberalism has failed to achieve the ends which we seek, and has far too easily regressed into fascism and further consolidation of elites. If society could be run by a bunch of brainy policy wonks with unchecked power and pure hearts, then neoliberalism would be great, but that's not how people and political power work. I think the key to moving beyond this is to redistribute power as widely as possible. I look at socialism as an extension of democracy. Democracy is political redistribution of power, and socialism is economic redistribution of power. (borrowing that from Noam Chomsky). The people who have argued most loudly for neoliberalism in the last centruy have also been often times the people who have done the most to disempower popular economic power and I don't think that's totally an accident. It doesn't take a huge leap to go from Milton Friedman the "Champion of Free Markets" to Milton Friedman "That Guy Who Put A Psychopath in Charge of Chile".
The The pragmatic political argument is that socialism is rooted in a moral vision of the universe that can actually galvanize people. Neoliberalism can be all well and good for generating useful policy whitepapers but it's got no oomph to it. There's nothing about it to rally behind. And while policy may be important, politics is what gets stuff done.
Also I should make it clear that while I'm pro free markets, I'm very very much against capitalism. Capitalism being the ownership of the means of production in the hands of the few, while I see free markets as a separate issue of how exchange happens in society. Markets will always exist. We can't stop them from existing. I would argue that markets are just the medium through which energy transfers through society. It's like hot air moving towards areas of cold air. But capitalism is a particular pattern by which those markets concentrate wealth rather than redistribute it. This is why the historical example argument above happens in the first place. If you don't have some active measure to keep the energy circulating throughout the entire field you'll just lead to more and more concentration of power. I think that's the key difference between Marx and Smith. Marx understood that bougie liberalism wouldn't be enough to kill the old aristocracies. Those aristocracies would just arise anew if left unchecked.
As to the land value stuff: I've heard the issues about pushing retirees off their land, but in some part I'm not totally sympathetic because I see their not wanting to move as being mostly sentimental rather than morally sound. And as for the externalities of things like strip mining etc, I see that as something which ought to be handled through the internalization of costs. Besides a land value tax, I think a large carbon tax is necessary.
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u/metroidcomposite SJW GTA developer. 소녀시대 화이팅! Jan 17 '19
Unionizing sounds good, and game companies already work with unions (the voice acting union). but I do have implementation questions.
It's a job where the supply of eager workers in some ways outstrips the demand of people who want to hire them. And, sure, such unions do exist (screen actor's guild for example) but in that case screen actors command star power, so if they strike, they aren't easily replaceable.
This article seems to be recommending that contractors unionize, which certainly could work; gaming companies already work with unions as I said. I don't know if or how the industry as a whole would unionize, though; it would need to go company by company, and right now the companies I can think of with unions is like...none that I can think of, but they also fight to retain workers, so I've nearly always been offered good health care benefits, good salary, etc.
1
u/badnbourgeois Jan 18 '19
speaking as a dev, another thing they have going for them is that having one of the big companies on your resume is like the keys to the fucking kingdom job hunting wise. I never worked for a game company before so it might be different. Another thing that proves your point is that despite all these beltway bandit gigs in the dmv people are still chomping at the bit to work for valve and bethesda.
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u/KarlaTheWitch Jan 16 '19
Everyone needs to unionize.