Collective bargaining has been unpopular in this industry for so long because 25 years ago pretty much any ADHD autodidact that was interested in tech could get an extremely promising job with nothing more than a high school diploma.
Naturally, these individuals had very little interest in waiting in line behind retiring gray-beards for high pay and job security. They experienced that just being interested in tech was enough for huge opportunities to fall into their lap.
Of course 25 years later, that ship has sailed and almost nobody is hiring people without a degree in C. And now you have the self taught gray-beards bumping up against ageism and the weird effects AI is having on the marketplace, and they're starting to wonder if, "hmmm, maybe unions aren't such a bad idea after all."
Unions can't defeat the forces of supply and demand. If people feel it is in their best interest to take a pay cut, they should be free to do so. If you want to take a job for a lower rate because of a mismatch in experience, union rates can amount to a ban on you getting a job. Likewise, if you can command a higher wage than average, no union should be able to tell you that you're not fit for the pay grade. If the self-taught greybeards don't understand this, they should self-teach themselves some basic economics.
Some of the healthiest, oldest, and most mutually respected unions are in the entertainment arts -- actors, musicians, writers, directors, etc. In these unions and in their negotiations, talent value is understood to sometimes be very singular; a particular education or apprenticeship process isn't deemed strictly necessary for talent to mature; and that work often comes in the form of a time-boxed project that might need many members for a while and then far less (or none) after it reaches some progress threshold, leading to cycles of on/off work.
What these unions achieve by forming solidarity between the most exceptional talent and more average working members is that they can establish baseline working conditions that are respectful and non-exploitative, a wage floor that allows occasional workers to earnestly commit to their trade even when confronted with intermittent downtime, internally managed group benefit programs that free producers from needing to administer and offer them and give members stability in participation, etc
A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union. And by the accounts of both talent and producers, at basically all levels, these unions fundamentally provide a clear benefit to the market. Tension and bluster flare up during frustrating negotiations, but almost nobody with experience in these industries wants to get rid of these unions. Not even the producers.
Unions work in entertainment because there is a lot of value in relationships and brand recognition. They still have the same disadvantages as they do in other fields, but the advantages make it fly anyway. If only the members of the union get to declare whether it's good or not, it will practically always be considered a success. Non-members don't get work, or at least get less. It is an inevitable outcome.
>A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union.
I don't think so. Software engineers are not generally operating in the brand or personality space. Their employers just want work done and nobody cares who does it.
I am running short on time but basically I want to leave you with the forgotten disadvantaged of unions: favoring more advantaged workers over more desperate ones, putting a floor on minimum skill level to get hired, costing everyone outside the union more money (including employers and consumers). Maybe these down sides can be negligible sometimes but you'll rarely hear anyone say this stuff. They talk about fellow humans who want to work more badly than themselves "scabs". I think unions can be a net positive but I don't buy the popular narrative that they are glorious with no disadvantages.
> putting a floor on minimum skill level to get hired
Oh hell yes.
Also, look at the cast of a movie. There are tens to hundreds of people. Very few of them are recognized names, at least to the general public. It's no only the big names that are union members, far from it.
I think you are excited about the skill level thing because you only want to work with skilled individuals, but you're looking at it wrong. That only works BEFORE you are hired. After hiring, really lame workers become harder to get rid of if they are in a union.
You remember the writer's strike right? The lesser paid writers were all over the internet complaining about their union, saying it was dominated by big name people who can afford to be on strike while the lesser paid people were becoming destitute. The same thing happens in other unions too, no doubt.
Suppose you wanted to work in a different technology stack and would perhaps be 75% as productive as more experienced people in the first year. According to union rules, based on your experience level, you might be shoehorned into a role where they would have to pay you more than you're worth. The same kind of shit happens to less specialized workers. If the minimum salary is higher than your expected productivity, and you can't adjust it according to market conditions, you will be unhireable. However, that is only in an honest system. Nepotism and bribery would be easier to justify when you don't let people get a fair shake.
> Unions can't defeat the forces of supply and demand
Oh, but they do! A core part of most union contracts is figuring out how to limit the number of people eligible to be hired.
That’s why “union shops” exist. Or: why (in the entertainment industry) a production pays a heavy fine to hire non-union actors. Doctors do a similar thing by having the AMA lobby to limit the number of credentials granted each year.
Ultimately, unions don't want to limit how many people get hired. They want to dictate how much those people have to be paid, and somehow get their cut. Businesses decide that they can't afford more people and find a way to succeed within the constraints imposed by the union. Unions can't force businesses to hire people they can't afford. They also can't stop others from being willing to work for less. That's what I mean about not beating supply and demand.
Naturally, these individuals had very little interest in waiting in line behind retiring gray-beards for high pay and job security. They experienced that just being interested in tech was enough for huge opportunities to fall into their lap.
Of course 25 years later, that ship has sailed and almost nobody is hiring people without a degree in C. And now you have the self taught gray-beards bumping up against ageism and the weird effects AI is having on the marketplace, and they're starting to wonder if, "hmmm, maybe unions aren't such a bad idea after all."