[leftyted]

There has to be a balance of power between labor and management. When management has too much power, that power will be abused. When labor has too much power, that power will be abused.

Unions make sense when labor doesn't have any power. Do programmers have enough power? I'd say yes. Maybe not across the board but -- in general -- yes. We aren't coal miners, that's for sure.

[eswat]

It depends on the specific industry in tech.

Do programmers in general tech startups have enough power? I’d say yes too. Do programmers in the gaming industry have enough power? Definitely not.

[ivl]

The gaming industry has an interesting problem: a lot of fresh college grads that want to work on games because they are passionate about games.

In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.

[asark]

How'd Hollywood do it? Film industry is full of unions, seems to do OK.

[barry-cotter]

By making it extremely hard to get into a union and working for the benefit of members and punishing employers of non-members.

[sigstoat]

> In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.

and game development work is probably the most trivial software development to move to foreign jurisdictions. unless the union promoters would like video game tariffs.

[ivl]

This may seem snide, but it's extremely rare for a union not to be protectionist. Mostly on account of how unions join together with unions for adjunct industries.

That said, I'm not convinced game development would be easily outsourced. Games are some of the most highly optimized pieces of software out there, as it's in their interest to squeeze every bit of performance out of consumer hardware. You can think of their target as an intersecting line between the game being playable on consumer hardware vs. the graphics quality users expect that would lead to the game selling. Optimization has a big payoff to increase the possible market to buy a given game.

[Apocryphon]

On the other hand, it remains to be seen how much gamers would then like those games.

[Pfhreak]

And even still where tech workers do have a lot of power, there are plenty of issues that we could use that power to improve (IP restrictions for off hours/open source projects, non-competes, parental leave, etc.)

[moorhosj]

But not all tech workers are programmers. To compare to another union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) represents machinists from Boeing and Harley-Davidson, distribution center workers at IKEA, and also wood, pulp and paper workers.

> https://www.goiam.org/