SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
UK video games workers unionize over 'wide-scale exploitation' and diversity issues
Games devs are routinely corralled to "crunch" to hit sequential release target deadlines to ensure a project gets delivered on time and budget. Unpaid overtime is a norm. Long hours are certainly expected. And taking any holiday across vast swathes of the year can be heavily frowned upon, if not barred entirely.
From the outside looking in it's hard not to conclude people's passion for gaming is being exploited in the big business interest of shipping lucrative titles to millions of gamers.
In the U.K. that view is now more than just a perception, with the decision of a group of video games workers to unionize.
The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) said today it's setting up a union branch for games workers, the first such in the country — and one of what's claimed as just a handful in the world — with the aim of tackling what it dubs the "wide-scale exploitation" of video games workers.
In recent years the union has gained attention for supporting workers in the so-called "gig economy," backing protests by delivery riders and drivers for companies including Uber and Deliveroo. But this is its first foray into representing games workers.
Also at RockPaperShotgun.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @06:42PM (2 children)
In principle, I love collective bargaining. It's a great way for groups to address common concerns, balancing monopsony power.
In practice, it has taken a rather difficult shape. Closed shops simply turn the problem the other way around - now the business has to put up with whatever insanity lurks in the shadows, to the point where it either leaves or goes broke.
It's also turned out to be a bad deal for workers. I've worked in many union shops (working in one right now, in fact) and we spend a lot of time working around situations where person A has seniority over person B, therefore person B gets training after person A, gets benefits after person A, and gets laid off before person A regardless of individual merit. Not much later, you find person B working in a non-union shop, making more money, with higher position, and cursing unions heart and soul.
Go figure.
The best model that I've found so far, is a sort of cooperative contracting firm. This way the original company retains as many vendors as it needs, the workers aren't locked into anywhere in particular, and there's room to reward merit. In fact, as a contractor I've generally found that contracting firms will go to bat for me if the original company is being a crowd of dickheads.
In this case, I don't dispute that the games industry has been particularly unpleasant to work for, but I don't think that unions are necessarily the answer. The economics are all wrong.
First, the jobs are very, very easy to ship overseas. Doesn't even have to be China - could just as easily be Texas.
Second, a lot of games work is on a per-project basis, with delivery meaning layoffs down to a skeleton crew. This probably means that there may be some kind of working conditions limitation during the game development, but when it's time for the pink slips, union membership means very little - or that the skeleton crew will be the incumbents with seniority for the next go-around, assuming that there is one.
Looking in my crystal ball, I see offshoring. And given the international nature of the industry, I don't see the trade unionists being able to stop that. The "race-to-the-bottom" ship has well and truly sailed.
(Score: 1) by MikeVDS on Monday December 17 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)
I agree with you and have seen many of the same situations you describe, however, that does not have to be the case. There are many unions that are getting their act together, and seniority becomes a tiebreaker, and the contract is only the minimum someone can receive. This means that the hard working, highly educated workers can go above and beyond. In cases when unions work ethically, I have seen industries come to the union to ask to be unionized because they want to pay their workers more and their competitors want to pay them more, but they needed the union to set that up for them so they would not be at a competitive disadvantage to the others.
I think if we modernize unions and see them as a business we hire to negotiate a better deal than we could against the companies' lawyers, we could be in better places.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:55AM
I agree that it doesn't have to be the case. The problem is that it is the case, and unions have (in the US, anyway) largely walled themselves into this corner.
This is why the contracting firm model seems to work better; for one thing, if one contracting firm is a collection of peckerheads, the company can tell them to pound sand. If the worker finds that the contracting firm is a collection of peckerheads, the worker can go over to the next contracting firm, and work through them.
Union boosters in the US complain that they're losing membership (ignoring government workers) and they're right. Where they're wrong is the reason. It's note because Snidely Whiplash is busting them up; it's because they're actively annoying their own powerbase - the workers.