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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: 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.