I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
Unions are complicated. Generally speaking they are good for workers, but when they start focusing on job security over compensation and build in seniority-based advantages, the leverage unions have can be wielded against consumers and fellow workers, not just against employers.
“Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes their power, and that can lead to bad practices in the long run.
If you care about fairness, generally, and not just “what’s good for me personally” you don’t have to look hard to see powerful unions acting in bad faith.
On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality.
The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.
I'm generally pro-union. Don't think that just because I criticize them that I don't think they're generally a good idea. The problems I'm pointing to are general problems of democracy in general. Incumbents tend to ignore future generations well-beings when it comes to current generations ability to negotiate.
The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."
I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.
Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.
You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.
You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.
If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.
There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.
No argument from me, other than: All those things can be also be said about corporations.
You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.
Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.
> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.
Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.
It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.
It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.
Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?
There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).
For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.
For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).
The advent of parallel treatment of different workers in a shop the late 1970's is one of the main reasons we saw union membership start declining. Two-tiered bargaining structures started to show up as soon as there were difficult economic headwinds. When one segment of the union with some seniority is unwilling to make sacrifices for the younger generations, you end up with as system that is bad for non-trivial number of workers, and is literally the opposite of meritocratic. Solidarity only goes as far as "I've got mine" for many folks, and when that happens, the union as a way of protecting workers turns into a vehicle for extracting concessions at the expense of others.
Examples of ruinous two-tiered contracts include UFCW's 1978 contract, Teamsters' 1979 contract, UAW's 1979 contract and their 2007 contract.
> ...how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers?
This is like asking how people can be anti Google when Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
I personally lean pro-union, but it takes very little empathy to understand that the people who are anti-union don't believe that the unions will serve their stated purpose.
I think you underestimate the anti-union propaganda of the last century. Any working class individual against unions parrot the same surface-level talking points predicated on their own limited understanding of labor. In a way they are bots; the alive variety.
I don't think they're bots, since I've seen the sentiment on HN for a long time. Instead, it reminds me of the idea of people seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". If you see yourself as being part of the capital class in the future and think strong unions hurt the capital class, one might be against them.
If not careful, it can come across as elitist: the notion that unions are for people who are replaceable—people that need unions.
I wonder though if those absolutely certain that they thrive in a meritocracy will have second thoughts if/when Corporate decides they're replaceable by AI.
You can do the math yourself if you so choose. If you don't want to or disagree with the results, well, it's not my job to educate you, as you've said.
Related topic: People Make Games has had really great coverage on Rockstar's illegal firing of the developers working on GTA 6 because of their unionization efforts
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.
There was an era about 10-15 years long where that was true but modern cards often fall back on very loose language that they tighten up with rulings prior or sometimes after release. See the language behind the "Prepared" key word in the newest set for a striking example.
I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).
Well there was a huge discussion on what it means amongst judges. On plain reading it does not do what it states it does. Start just with the phrase "its spell" - those words are entirely undefined until getting into the rulings, and don't mean what they mean in other contexts. It makes no mention of the prior rules that it sort of hacks into this either.
I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.
Ah, I have I guess an old version of the CR downloaded from when I was a judge and TO where rule section 722 is "Controlling Another Player," weird reorganization there.
Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).
Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.
Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.
I'm specifically talking about the use case of "can we use natural-language tools to parse oracle text and produce functioning game objects in Arena". For that use case, it's completely sensible to look at the actual rules text and not reminder text.
Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".
I think that level of ambiguity would be fairly easy to tighten up using the CLIPS system that was previously discussed. It isn't bug-proof and has needed manual tune-ups before but it's much more "hardened" than what we think of as AI now with LLM-powered tools.
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
That's all labor that can only be done "here and now." Can't just have Indians do it over the internet. And replacing the workers at a moment's notice is usually complicated by the striking workers harassing and attacking the replacements. Again, hard to do that when your replacement is on the other side of the globe.
You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result. It will be from an entirely different cultural framework.
> You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result.
If you fed all the lore into an LLM and trained diffusion models on all the artwork I bet you could keep the train running from India until the end of time. The only thing that would derail it is if customers _knew_ it wasn't "authentic."
I don't think LLMs are anywhere near careful enough with their wording to not break the game. Non-native speakers will have a similiar problem if they are extremely proficient.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
Magic: the Gathering is the only profitable arm of Hasbro. I don't have the specific revenue numbers, but Arena is a huge part of the ecosystem. Sure, society at large wouldn't care, but letting the Arena release schedule slip behind the "paper cards" product would be a huge embarrassment within the community of customers and content creators that fuel the MTG machine. I would be shocked if they let it happen lightly.
I would be a lot less shocked if Hasbro sends in the Pinkertons to do some "persuasion" in the coming weeks and months:
Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them.
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
> Remote Work Protections: Leadership is instituting a mandatory RTO, forcing numerous remote employees across the US to work from a physical office or be forced to resign.
This alone is enough reason for anyone to be up in arms and unionize. Kudos to them for banding together for better working conditions. I hope more big companies follow suit.
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.
> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.
All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.
This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.
Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.
> When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Yes, you're right. The common (lazy) approach for companies that don't give a shit is "we own everything because it might be complicated to introduce ambiguity and we own you anyway".
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
> > On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.
It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.
This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.
every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.
Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.
It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.
I hate unions, but I've noticed they only form when there's some sort of abuse. Treat employees well, and this isn't a problem.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
> a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
To me, this comment is a bucket of contradictions.
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
In other news, with common sense and widespread honor, dignity and honesty, every form of government can work beautifully well, from anarchy to plutarchy to democracy to dictatorship, either using capitalism, communism or any other -ism.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
The point of a union is not prevent layoffs and role reduction in force. It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem (that they're trying to solve with layoffs) and ensures that the company is accountable for all their decisions.
This just limits hiring in the first place as we see in European branches of (generally, American) tech companies. And regardless, what solutions can be found by the union?
As for what solutions union provide - I have already explained. They exist to protect workers' interests. They do not exist to solve company's problems. That is the job of the company.
For hiring, I meant it in terms of a chilling effect in that companies will not hire as many people as they are much harder to fire.
You said "It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem," and I am asking, what solutions have unions "made sure" that the companies have done instead of layoffs? I am looking for concrete examples as I often hear this claim but I'm not sure what a union can do if the solution is layoffs, so my question is, what other solutions are there?
Then, I suggest that you educate yourself on how unions function and what they do. It's not my job to educate you. You can also ChatGPT this by the way.
I see, looks like you don't actually have any examples to give despite you yourself making such a claim, on a discussion forum and thread to discuss a topic, so lead with that next time, because that's all that the phrase "It's not my job to educate you" means.
Is that a serious question? Providing for education possibilities, legislating against noncompete agreements to hinder workers to start out on their own, challenging illegal decisions, the list goes on.
The claim was that the union would find solutions instead of a layoff so how would legislating help in that immediate case where a company wants to lay people off in the next quarter? I'm not asking about general things unions do, I'm challenging this specific claim the parent made.
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
And what has that really bought them? The wages are laughable compared to the US where you'd THINK us non-unionized tech workers would be paid minimum wage. And the famous European healthcare and long vacations are more a function of the government than anything the unions have explicitly bargained for.
They might have been declining since then, but more recently I'd point to when they introduced Dr. Who, Transformers, My Little Pony, and a whole bunch of other crap into a game about wizards fighting in a fantasy world.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
That was 1999. Invasion came out that year. Innistrad, Mirrodin, Ravnica, and other settings all came out after Hasbro's acquisition.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
This is a cancer that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible by firing them all. It is a toxic ideologically that should not be allowed to permeate.
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
>but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate.
At a company like WotC you will get more than 2 weeks of pay worth of severance which is more than the employee equivalent of providing 2 weeks notice. There is also things like WARN in California which require much more than a 2 weeks notice when a doing a layoff.
>Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility.
Except that individual productivity is very often not the bottleneck. The goal should be making the process productive and efficient.
>only enforceable when the media is produced by humans
Hollywood has used AI and other machine produced graphics for special effects for years and that does not prevent the studio from having copyright over the movie.
>stop licking boots
Acknowledging how much value companies bring to both society and investors does not require licking boots or thinking they are a "poor endangered company."
Companies often expect employees to give advance
notice of termination of employment, but employers
do not feel beholden to their employees to
reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
Workers can leave their jobs with no notice period at all and suffer no legal consequences. The traditional two weeks notice period is a courtesy and not legally required. Meanwhile, employers often have extensive legal limitations on how many workers they can fire at a time (for example, because of the WARN act). It may be impossible to fire some workers (for example, those on disability leave). It's traditional for employers to pay severance to employees that are fired or laid off, and this may sometimes be legally required.
Nobody can force a worker to work, but an employer is often forced to employ someone they'd rather not. Maybe sometimes this makes sense, but it's actually the exact opposite of what you're trying to claim.
Many companies showed improved productivity when
people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary
are often not backed up by actual data outside of
cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial
positions.
If remove work is so productive, then management should choose remote work without any coercion. If you want more benefits, then just be honest and don't make claims that you know better than management about what is productive.
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is
protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far
(thankfully), only enforceable when the media
is produced by humans. Protections against the
use of generative AI are not only good for
workers' long-term productivity, but also
for legal purposes
Copyright applies to works that are partially produced by AI and partially produced by humans. Refusing to use the tools that everyone else is using to be more productive is just going to make companies into dinosaurs.
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and
start understanding why any of our society works
today at all.
The union is also a corporation, which makes profit for its officers. Maybe you should stop licking its boots?
As a hint, every protection you have
ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement
funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time
off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid
for in blood by someone a company decided was not more
important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability
by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think
it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those
working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random
person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor
endangered company! :("
I'm not a member of any union. The protections I enjoy are because of the law, which applies to everyone, and because of the economic situation. If the economic situation changes, I will be fired no matter what unions or governments do, the same way saddle-makers were after the rise of the automobile.
Awful news and a sign that WOTC has lost control of the company. The writing has been on the wall for WOTC for a while now, and this will exacerbate their decline. Amazing how unionists seize the body of their host when it is weakest.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight
A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.
My big gripe with unions is the unwavering protection of their worst performing members.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
I doubt you'll find many people in favor of how bad cops get protected by police unions either. At least in the US I'd much rather a broad social net so my health care and retirement weren't so directly tied to my job than a union specific to my trade.
A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title.
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
Salary is only one of many workplace issues that organizing can help with. Those US tech people who make $400k, that's great for them! But how is their mental health / burnout? How good is their health insurance? Are they getting enough vacation time or time with their families? Are they regularly expected to work 12+ hour days? Do they have their weekends? Do they want to Work From Home but can't get it? What about permission to moonlight or work on side projects? Do they have satisfying autonomy at work or are they just churning through JIRA tickets?
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
Generally big tech workers have very cushy jobs with excellent insurance and working conditions with many barely working over 30 hours a week, much less 40. It is why many do not see the benefits of a union because what could a union possibly give them?
This is far from the norm. If it's true for a small number of employees at a small number of companies in a small number of regions, that doesn't mean it's true for everyone. I don't know a single employee who thinks absolutely nothing could be made better at work.
Sure, everyone has something they'd want to make better but I'm not sure a union is the tool that can fix them, lots of them are management issues endemic to the company.
Because generally they can, as software engineers had huge leverage over their employers for the past few decades, so much so that literal parodies like Silicon Valley were made of the cushiness of their jobs. Maybe that is changing now with AI but I doubt it.
I have gotten a lot of mileage asking from these types once we get to the “I can negotiate my own raises” by asking them how many times they’ve actually tried negotiating much less succeeded.
The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
Is that actually the case for the tech unions that actually exist, though? Historically, the people pushing for tech unionization were doing it for ideological reasons, not in response to the relatively recent layoffs, etc. and you can see this in their leadership.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
It sounds like you’re just as ideologically in your opposition if you’re bringing up James Damore.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
I think that Damore was stupid for writing and posting it internally and disagree with portions of it, but almost all of the reactions I saw to his manifesto were to third-hand misrepresentations of it or willful misreadings of it. (e.g. him referring to population statistics on neuroticism being interpreted as him saying that his female coworkers were neurotic). I think your reply is the perfect example: he wasn't advocating for women to be 'removed', he was arguing that DEI efforts to try to get a 50/50 male/female balance are fundamentally misguided because not as many women want to work in tech as men.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
> Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
In the real world case of long standing Teachers Unions in Australia (they vary by state) it is literally impossible to answer such a question on the basis of such a shallow construct.
The answer is both Yes and No - in any specific case the individual circumstances would be looked at - eg: as laid out Yes, they defend, however in most IRL cases the circumstances on the ground are far more complex, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a bunch of fellow peer union member coworkers to speak up in favour of not defending.
> Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Yea. But if I made a claim that h1b holders were biologically disinclined to not be as capable of doing software, I wouldn’t.
In the case of many teachers, there is no "company". The union fights valiantly against the State, and against the pay structure Voters democratically select for their public servants.
Further, I posit that existence of such Unions serves as an incentive for voters not to simply assign more pay and benefits to such servants directly. Mayors and Governors know that it's always going to be a "Union game" and all they can do is negotiate - even when they're Progressives who actually want to pay teachers well.
It just gets worse when it's Cops instead of State School teachers.
Big assumption about "interests" lead to bad analysis, in my experience.
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Of course, and that's why some people are opposed to a union, but then others say you're just falling for propaganda or some such nonsense if you deign to have any, even small, criticism of unions.
> If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Yes, this is a big part of my critique.
I'm no lawyer and can't provide a useful explanation of the "why", but literally every educator I know is in the Educator's union. Same with Cops and Nurses. I don't know any airline pilots but I understand it's the same way.
You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
The criticality of the industry, for whatever subjective measure you’re using there, doesn’t matter for union forming.
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
A union's objective is to protect and safeguard the interest of its members. As long as it does that, it adds value, regardless of what anyone else (especially those not in the union) thinks whether it has value.
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
Presumably employees were unhappy. It's rare that unions spring up when everyone is treated well and paid fairly.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.
Unions aren't really there for customer service. Nonetheless, there's often times where the worker demand benefit customers too: Nurses fight for better nurse:patient ratios, benefiting patients too; teachers fight for the resources for them to teach well; starbucks baristas fight for a work pace that allows them to actually engage customers like the brand used to offer. etc
Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.
Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the specifics. Can you link clear proof that unions were preventing necessary downsizing, and that this downsizing would have saved the company?
I'm glad to see this.
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
Unions are complicated. Generally speaking they are good for workers, but when they start focusing on job security over compensation and build in seniority-based advantages, the leverage unions have can be wielded against consumers and fellow workers, not just against employers.
“Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes their power, and that can lead to bad practices in the long run.
If you care about fairness, generally, and not just “what’s good for me personally” you don’t have to look hard to see powerful unions acting in bad faith.
On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality.
The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
Your point is noted.
But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.
I'm generally pro-union. Don't think that just because I criticize them that I don't think they're generally a good idea. The problems I'm pointing to are general problems of democracy in general. Incumbents tend to ignore future generations well-beings when it comes to current generations ability to negotiate.
The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."
I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.
Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.
You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.
You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.
If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.
There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.
No argument from me, other than: All those things can be also be said about corporations.
You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.
Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.
Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.
It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.
It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.
Also theft by corporations is one of the largest types of theft in the US.
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?
There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).
For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.
For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).
https://koncontributes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...
The advent of parallel treatment of different workers in a shop the late 1970's is one of the main reasons we saw union membership start declining. Two-tiered bargaining structures started to show up as soon as there were difficult economic headwinds. When one segment of the union with some seniority is unwilling to make sacrifices for the younger generations, you end up with as system that is bad for non-trivial number of workers, and is literally the opposite of meritocratic. Solidarity only goes as far as "I've got mine" for many folks, and when that happens, the union as a way of protecting workers turns into a vehicle for extracting concessions at the expense of others.
Examples of ruinous two-tiered contracts include UFCW's 1978 contract, Teamsters' 1979 contract, UAW's 1979 contract and their 2007 contract.
> ...how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers?
This is like asking how people can be anti Google when Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
I personally lean pro-union, but it takes very little empathy to understand that the people who are anti-union don't believe that the unions will serve their stated purpose.
I think you underestimate the anti-union propaganda of the last century. Any working class individual against unions parrot the same surface-level talking points predicated on their own limited understanding of labor. In a way they are bots; the alive variety.
I would wager that a high % of the HN audience are the employers, not the employees.
Or just highly paid or now retired employees. Which makes sense, why bite the hand that feeds.
I don't think they're bots, since I've seen the sentiment on HN for a long time. Instead, it reminds me of the idea of people seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". If you see yourself as being part of the capital class in the future and think strong unions hurt the capital class, one might be against them.
I agree.
If not careful, it can come across as elitist: the notion that unions are for people who are replaceable—people that need unions.
I wonder though if those absolutely certain that they thrive in a meritocracy will have second thoughts if/when Corporate decides they're replaceable by AI.
I mean, many on HN are actual millionaires who've made fortunes from tech money. They are the capital class, so unions hurt them directly.
How many?
You can do the math yourself if you so choose. If you don't want to or disagree with the results, well, it's not my job to educate you, as you've said.
Related topic: People Make Games has had really great coverage on Rockstar's illegal firing of the developers working on GTA 6 because of their unionization efforts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuipPQDd_w
Back when Arena was first announced, there was an interesting line in their write-up:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.
[1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/
There was an era about 10-15 years long where that was true but modern cards often fall back on very loose language that they tighten up with rulings prior or sometimes after release. See the language behind the "Prepared" key word in the newest set for a striking example.
I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).
Well there was a huge discussion on what it means amongst judges. On plain reading it does not do what it states it does. Start just with the phrase "its spell" - those words are entirely undefined until getting into the rulings, and don't mean what they mean in other contexts. It makes no mention of the prior rules that it sort of hacks into this either.
I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.
I'm a judge and have seen barely any discussion around Prepared (mostly just clarification around the interaction with.
Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant.
The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.
Ah, I have I guess an old version of the CR downloaded from when I was a judge and TO where rule section 722 is "Controlling Another Player," weird reorganization there.
Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).
Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.
Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.
I'm specifically talking about the use case of "can we use natural-language tools to parse oracle text and produce functioning game objects in Arena". For that use case, it's completely sensible to look at the actual rules text and not reminder text.
Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".
I think that level of ambiguity would be fairly easy to tighten up using the CLIPS system that was previously discussed. It isn't bug-proof and has needed manual tune-ups before but it's much more "hardened" than what we think of as AI now with LLM-powered tools.
I'm actually working on this right now! https://chiplis.com/ironsmith
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
This is seriously impressive!!
What are you planning on doing with this? Where should I follow along?
As others have said, there is an actual concrete system for translating card text into rules, and it's not an LLM (which would be a disaster).
I assume the wording in this letter is referring to using LLMs to generate slop as creative assets like images and music.
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
That's all labor that can only be done "here and now." Can't just have Indians do it over the internet. And replacing the workers at a moment's notice is usually complicated by the striking workers harassing and attacking the replacements. Again, hard to do that when your replacement is on the other side of the globe.
You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result. It will be from an entirely different cultural framework.
Hard but not impossible, whereas with something like a longshoremen union, it is literally impossible to move the work elsewhere.
> You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result.
If you fed all the lore into an LLM and trained diffusion models on all the artwork I bet you could keep the train running from India until the end of time. The only thing that would derail it is if customers _knew_ it wasn't "authentic."
I don't think LLMs are anywhere near careful enough with their wording to not break the game. Non-native speakers will have a similiar problem if they are extremely proficient.
I think on the contrary somewhat
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
Most entertainment industries have very strong union presence.
Well, it happens that the company that has workers on strike at some point stops making money because of that.
Magic: the Gathering is the only profitable arm of Hasbro. I don't have the specific revenue numbers, but Arena is a huge part of the ecosystem. Sure, society at large wouldn't care, but letting the Arena release schedule slip behind the "paper cards" product would be a huge embarrassment within the community of customers and content creators that fuel the MTG machine. I would be shocked if they let it happen lightly.
I would be a lot less shocked if Hasbro sends in the Pinkertons to do some "persuasion" in the coming weeks and months:
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/new...
What has unionizing and society caring have got to do with each other?
The point isn't about what society cares about. The company loses its investment entirely unless they bargain with the union
Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them.
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
Well, the theater and Hollywood workers themselves starve, as seen in the last recent strike, with many not being able to make ends meet.
Doing that would nuke your career. What company wants to hire someone who sabotaged their previous employer?
What worker wants to work for an employer that pays them bare minimum and treats them as a replaceable cog?
> Remote Work Protections: Leadership is instituting a mandatory RTO, forcing numerous remote employees across the US to work from a physical office or be forced to resign.
This alone is enough reason for anyone to be up in arms and unionize. Kudos to them for banding together for better working conditions. I hope more big companies follow suit.
Somewhat related, this book is pretty good: https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/
It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.
From the full letter[1]:
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter
Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.
Most? No. Many, sure.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.
> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.
> HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you.
Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.
Do you have any figures that show it's _most_? I sure hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised either.
Finding one that doesn't would be very hard.
All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.
This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Yes, but you have to declare them to the company and the company must approve them. If they don’t, because it’s competitive, you’re out of luck.
I’ve seen this done as a carve-out or exception that has to be explicitly documented. Trouble is that documentation is not presented as simple.
The relevance isn’t wholly work hours but rather “work for hire,” I.e. if it’s in the scope of your paid responsibilities.
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.
Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
It's not at all uncommon, and important.
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.
> When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Yes, you're right. The common (lazy) approach for companies that don't give a shit is "we own everything because it might be complicated to introduce ambiguity and we own you anyway".
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
> > On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.
It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.
This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.
That's not correct. "Arbeitnehmererfindungen" only apply to inventions you make as part of your paid work. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitnehmererfindung
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
When I was looking for my last job a company wanted me to sign something similar to that. I declined their offer and got a job elsewhere instead.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.
every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.
Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.
Google has a similar clause in their employee contracts. I assume most tech companies do.
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.
It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
It’s very enforceable.
Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.
Pretty common actually.
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
What is the Arena team? Looks like the team that makes the Magic The Gathering video game?
Arena is WotC's video game version of Magic the Gathering, yeah. Notably it's got microtransactions and such for opening packs of cards.
TBF, that's just kind of built into the product naturally.
There are several MTG video-games. In this case, it's "Magic: The Gathering Arena"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic%3A_The_Gathering_Arena
I had one that came on a cd. I played that for ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_(1997_vid...
Given the historic opposition of many employers to unions, perhaps this should be tagged NSFW?
I hate unions, but I've noticed they only form when there's some sort of abuse. Treat employees well, and this isn't a problem.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
> a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
To me, this comment is a bucket of contradictions.
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
In other news, with common sense and widespread honor, dignity and honesty, every form of government can work beautifully well, from anarchy to plutarchy to democracy to dictatorship, either using capitalism, communism or any other -ism.
Great to see! I think unions should be the default for most situations.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
Yea it is odd. Bc then tech workers get fired on mass just to get a little boost in stock price. And yet many don't think we need a union...
I don't think a union would prevent them getting fired though, much less getting outsourced to areas without unions.
The point of a union is not prevent layoffs and role reduction in force. It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem (that they're trying to solve with layoffs) and ensures that the company is accountable for all their decisions.
This just limits hiring in the first place as we see in European branches of (generally, American) tech companies. And regardless, what solutions can be found by the union?
It does not limit hiring in any way.
As for what solutions union provide - I have already explained. They exist to protect workers' interests. They do not exist to solve company's problems. That is the job of the company.
For hiring, I meant it in terms of a chilling effect in that companies will not hire as many people as they are much harder to fire.
You said "It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem," and I am asking, what solutions have unions "made sure" that the companies have done instead of layoffs? I am looking for concrete examples as I often hear this claim but I'm not sure what a union can do if the solution is layoffs, so my question is, what other solutions are there?
Then, I suggest that you educate yourself on how unions function and what they do. It's not my job to educate you. You can also ChatGPT this by the way.
I see, looks like you don't actually have any examples to give despite you yourself making such a claim, on a discussion forum and thread to discuss a topic, so lead with that next time, because that's all that the phrase "It's not my job to educate you" means.
Is that a serious question? Providing for education possibilities, legislating against noncompete agreements to hinder workers to start out on their own, challenging illegal decisions, the list goes on.
The claim was that the union would find solutions instead of a layoff so how would legislating help in that immediate case where a company wants to lay people off in the next quarter? I'm not asking about general things unions do, I'm challenging this specific claim the parent made.
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
I'm not sure, this is a good way to dismiss anything one doesn't like as "propaganda," it doesn't really tell us much.
And they are in much of Europe! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, etc. Even France has over 80% coverage
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
And what has that really bought them? The wages are laughable compared to the US where you'd THINK us non-unionized tech workers would be paid minimum wage. And the famous European healthcare and long vacations are more a function of the government than anything the unions have explicitly bargained for.
You mean to tell me unions can make a government actually responsive to its people? Gee wouldn't that be nice to have here
WOTC has been on a downward trend since the Hasbro acquisition.
They might have been declining since then, but more recently I'd point to when they introduced Dr. Who, Transformers, My Little Pony, and a whole bunch of other crap into a game about wizards fighting in a fantasy world.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
That was 27 years ago. They were only founded 9 years before that.
The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D
D&D is famously not more popular than ever and is one of the reasons why so many OSR's have exploded in popularity over the past 5-10 years.
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
It's their house now, and it's fine.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
Short form brain rot and fentanyl are more popular than ever.
Popularity is not a reliable metric.
That was 1999. Invasion came out that year. Innistrad, Mirrodin, Ravnica, and other settings all came out after Hasbro's acquisition.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
This is a cancer that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible by firing them all. It is a toxic ideologically that should not be allowed to permeate.
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
> Layoff Protections
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
>but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate.
At a company like WotC you will get more than 2 weeks of pay worth of severance which is more than the employee equivalent of providing 2 weeks notice. There is also things like WARN in California which require much more than a 2 weeks notice when a doing a layoff.
>Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility.
Except that individual productivity is very often not the bottleneck. The goal should be making the process productive and efficient.
>only enforceable when the media is produced by humans
Hollywood has used AI and other machine produced graphics for special effects for years and that does not prevent the studio from having copyright over the movie.
>stop licking boots
Acknowledging how much value companies bring to both society and investors does not require licking boots or thinking they are a "poor endangered company."
Nobody can force a worker to work, but an employer is often forced to employ someone they'd rather not. Maybe sometimes this makes sense, but it's actually the exact opposite of what you're trying to claim.
If remove work is so productive, then management should choose remote work without any coercion. If you want more benefits, then just be honest and don't make claims that you know better than management about what is productive. Copyright applies to works that are partially produced by AI and partially produced by humans. Refusing to use the tools that everyone else is using to be more productive is just going to make companies into dinosaurs. The union is also a corporation, which makes profit for its officers. Maybe you should stop licking its boots? I'm not a member of any union. The protections I enjoy are because of the law, which applies to everyone, and because of the economic situation. If the economic situation changes, I will be fired no matter what unions or governments do, the same way saddle-makers were after the rise of the automobile.Awful news and a sign that WOTC has lost control of the company. The writing has been on the wall for WOTC for a while now, and this will exacerbate their decline. Amazing how unionists seize the body of their host when it is weakest.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
> None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
That's because none of these would-be founders know how to turn a profit without exploiting their workers. :)
I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight
The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".)
The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.
My big gripe with unions is the unwavering protection of their worst performing members.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_center
I doubt you'll find many people in favor of how bad cops get protected by police unions either. At least in the US I'd much rather a broad social net so my health care and retirement weren't so directly tied to my job than a union specific to my trade.
A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title.
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Google%2CMeta%2CA... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Salary is only one of many workplace issues that organizing can help with. Those US tech people who make $400k, that's great for them! But how is their mental health / burnout? How good is their health insurance? Are they getting enough vacation time or time with their families? Are they regularly expected to work 12+ hour days? Do they have their weekends? Do they want to Work From Home but can't get it? What about permission to moonlight or work on side projects? Do they have satisfying autonomy at work or are they just churning through JIRA tickets?
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
Generally big tech workers have very cushy jobs with excellent insurance and working conditions with many barely working over 30 hours a week, much less 40. It is why many do not see the benefits of a union because what could a union possibly give them?
This is far from the norm. If it's true for a small number of employees at a small number of companies in a small number of regions, that doesn't mean it's true for everyone. I don't know a single employee who thinks absolutely nothing could be made better at work.
Sure, everyone has something they'd want to make better but I'm not sure a union is the tool that can fix them, lots of them are management issues endemic to the company.
Because generally they can, as software engineers had huge leverage over their employers for the past few decades, so much so that literal parodies like Silicon Valley were made of the cushiness of their jobs. Maybe that is changing now with AI but I doubt it.
I have gotten a lot of mileage asking from these types once we get to the “I can negotiate my own raises” by asking them how many times they’ve actually tried negotiating much less succeeded.
The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
Is that actually the case for the tech unions that actually exist, though? Historically, the people pushing for tech unionization were doing it for ideological reasons, not in response to the relatively recent layoffs, etc. and you can see this in their leadership.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
It sounds like you’re just as ideologically in your opposition if you’re bringing up James Damore.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
I think that Damore was stupid for writing and posting it internally and disagree with portions of it, but almost all of the reactions I saw to his manifesto were to third-hand misrepresentations of it or willful misreadings of it. (e.g. him referring to population statistics on neuroticism being interpreted as him saying that his female coworkers were neurotic). I think your reply is the perfect example: he wasn't advocating for women to be 'removed', he was arguing that DEI efforts to try to get a 50/50 male/female balance are fundamentally misguided because not as many women want to work in tech as men.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
> Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
In the real world case of long standing Teachers Unions in Australia (they vary by state) it is literally impossible to answer such a question on the basis of such a shallow construct.
The answer is both Yes and No - in any specific case the individual circumstances would be looked at - eg: as laid out Yes, they defend, however in most IRL cases the circumstances on the ground are far more complex, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a bunch of fellow peer union member coworkers to speak up in favour of not defending.
> Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Yea. But if I made a claim that h1b holders were biologically disinclined to not be as capable of doing software, I wouldn’t.
Damore was just a misogynist.
In the case of many teachers, there is no "company". The union fights valiantly against the State, and against the pay structure Voters democratically select for their public servants.
Further, I posit that existence of such Unions serves as an incentive for voters not to simply assign more pay and benefits to such servants directly. Mayors and Governors know that it's always going to be a "Union game" and all they can do is negotiate - even when they're Progressives who actually want to pay teachers well.
It just gets worse when it's Cops instead of State School teachers.
Big assumption about "interests" lead to bad analysis, in my experience.
> You have to join the Union, after all
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Of course, and that's why some people are opposed to a union, but then others say you're just falling for propaganda or some such nonsense if you deign to have any, even small, criticism of unions.
> If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Yes, this is a big part of my critique.
I'm no lawyer and can't provide a useful explanation of the "why", but literally every educator I know is in the Educator's union. Same with Cops and Nurses. I don't know any airline pilots but I understand it's the same way.
Some jobs it is mandatory to join the union in America anyway
You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
Well, unions do not exist to keep people entrenched on their jobs. That perspective is propaganda (by you-know-who).
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
> Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage
And in knowledge work we're not instantly replaceable. That's why anti-union propaganda is rampant in SWE fields.
Strikes are to get power over the company, not over society.
The criticality of the industry, for whatever subjective measure you’re using there, doesn’t matter for union forming.
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
A union's objective is to protect and safeguard the interest of its members. As long as it does that, it adds value, regardless of what anyone else (especially those not in the union) thinks whether it has value.
How does an experienced teacher or pilot differ from an experienced game designer?
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
Presumably employees were unhappy. It's rare that unions spring up when everyone is treated well and paid fairly.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.
> I am skeptical there is any customer benefit
Unions aren't really there for customer service. Nonetheless, there's often times where the worker demand benefit customers too: Nurses fight for better nurse:patient ratios, benefiting patients too; teachers fight for the resources for them to teach well; starbucks baristas fight for a work pace that allows them to actually engage customers like the brand used to offer. etc
Stability of development, features etc is to the customer's benefit.
Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.
Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.
GM circa 2008 would like to have a word
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the specifics. Can you link clear proof that unions were preventing necessary downsizing, and that this downsizing would have saved the company?
Unions rarely form because everyone is being treated well (humanely) and/or paid appropriately.
The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?
since some of their gripes are "use ai" and "rto" I don't think we are talking about a sweatshop.