Funny how the "story" doesn't link to the announcement it mostly copied from the CWA.[1]
Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.
Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.
A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood.
Some terms from TAG's standard contract:
All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or
forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times
the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.
Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of
the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly
rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on
the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two
(2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's
classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours
(including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be
Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly
rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]
This encourages management to schedule realistically.
The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.
Member of a union here -- two, in fact! -- in unrelated industries. "1.5x for overtime, 2x for 7th day" is pretty standard. If they were hourly employees and not getting a deal similar to this before, they were getting ripped off.
You know, 1.5x for overtime seems great until it is enforced for everybody (like it's done in Quebec) and so it is forbidden by company leadership unless it is deemed a necessity. So for people with more time on their hands than responsabilities, they usually can't (voluntarily) work more in their main job to boost their pay, and so they get side jobs, which are usually not declared.
Mandated 1.5x overtime has consequences.
Another side effect (that I know happens in manufacturing jobs) is that people will deliberately slow their work during the week to work overtime on the weekend. I'd wager this is very common in jobs with frequent overtime opportunities.
> So for people with more time on their hands than responsabilities
What kind of widget are we building where underemployed meth-heads get to show up for as long as they want and set their own pay schedules? Nothing in life works like this.
Look at it this way: Why would you hire someone who doesn't think they're worth market rate?
Would you mind explaining the difference between industrial vs trade union? Would something like the janitorial staff of a building owned by a gaming company be covered in an industrial union?
Ask Google about "difference between industrial and craft union".
There's US labor history involved. The AFL-CIO was formed by a 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL was the umbrella organization for the craft unions - electricians, plumbers, etc. The CIO was the umbrella organization for the industrial unions - everybody non-management in an auto plant, everybody non-management in a steel mill, etc. That's what "wall to wall" means.
Agreeing on the bargaining unit is a major issue in employer-union relations. A "wall to wall" agreement avoids internal issues over who can do what job. (Is plumbing for compressed air a plumber or a steamfitter job?) That helps the employer. But it gives the union more leverage over the employer because the union has all the employees.
Industrial unions organize by shop; craft unions organize by trade. Industrial unions have much greater leverage because they can (theoretically) change conditions for the entire workplace, not just for one group of workers in the workplace. Historically, this meant, for example, organizing everyone in the auto factory in one union as “auto workers” instead of having machinists in one union, engravers in another union, mechanics in another, etc.
Yeah that's happened to me too, better than nothing though!
Luckily my current work comps my time into PTO and they are generally fairly accurate. Definitely an exception though. This is the only job I've had in the games industry that has done this for me.
Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.
You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.
Conversely, it might be great comfort to someone who has a job because their company didn't go out of business. The point of unions isn't to punish business. The point of unions is to empower workers. One of the things workers can do with that power is ensure their business stays afloat and jobs remain, for example policies promoting long term health and stability rather than short term stock price bumps and volatility or corporate strip mining, even if it means executives get smaller bonuses.
The point is rather that the company would go under with our without the union. The union just means the staff aren't plundered along with the electric cables as the shop sinks.
The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.
In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.
But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
Indeed. I'm not without sympathy for anyone who loses their job. But losing the job due to an anti-working class parasite going belly up is not entirely a tragedy. One less parasite in the world is a good thing.
Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.
Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.
Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.
LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.
It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.
Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.
I work in a bank with collective agreement and three trade unions. We are dropping offshore contracts before we lay off people covered by collective agreement.
The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.
Ironically, China has also proven that you can't easily import expertise. At best, you can "steal" it over a long period of being the current industrial center's gopher.
People in the game industry are pretty often out of work anyways, so I don’t know how much there is to lose there. But industry wide unions can help with this, by providing financial assistance to workers laid off from union organized strikes.
That assumes that the union never unfairly exploits the company. I think historical evidence shows that unions sometimes do exploit the company (and that union leaders sometimes exploit the members). Humans exploiting other humans is a flaw of all of us, not just corporate management.
Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
You're trying to minimize the power of the union by quoting dollar amounts, when the whole point of the union is to have power, and the whole point of unionization is to defeat superior dollar amounts by capturing the organizational memory that money cannot buy.
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
What you say is true but it does not represent the spirit of what has happened historically. Historically the means of production exploit labor vastly more frequently and with greater degrees of extremity than the inverse.
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
The Union is a business too - and it's product is the labor of it's members.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
> We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
Pay is a but a single way in which an employer can attempt to unfairly exploit you.
The rest tends to hide behind culture and opportunity. Unpaid overtime framed as dedication, scope creep framed as growth, on-call expectations framed as ownership, understaffing framed as efficiency. You might find these game developers being abused by a few or all of these examples.
Exploitive companies can borrow against your pride, your fear of falling behind, and your desire to be seen as competent until your baseline becomes always available.
I support that freedom! I just think the idea that all employee-employer relationships are exploitative is wrong. It feels derived from Marx's long discredited labour theory of value.
It is of course possible for an employer to treat employees very poorly and arguably exploit them. But it is also possible for employers to lose money for years such that employees are effectively exploiting the employer.
I can imagine unions being a great force of good in the world, but whether they are or are not is largely down to how they behave, just like individuals, corporations and other organizations & institutions.
A union that bargains collectively for it's members sounds very straightforward and logical.
A union like the NYC hotel union that actively lobbies for fewer hotels feels insane.
Employers having to pay more than they'd prefer to pay for a given type of work/provide better working conditions does not imply "unfair exploitation" of the company by the union, either.
It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
> It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
It's not a market, at all. It's only possible because of federal law that prevents a business from firing employees for unionizing. If it were a market, the business would have to choose to keep unionzed workers voluntarily. The fact that they don't means it's more like the business being held hostage.
The equivalent would be employees being required by law to stay at a company they don't want to work for. Essentially indentured servitude.
The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?
Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g
a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.
There are a lot of defacto cartels where all of the corporations determine a ceiling on wages they won't go over.
There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
> There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.
Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?
And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.
This collusion affected 8 companies, and stopped over a decade and a half ago. Is there any evidence that Id employees are being subject to this kind of no poach agreement?
Many markets today only exist due to unfair exploitation of its staff, and the exploitation will continue for quite a long time if everyone who unionizes ends up without a job, since that will discourage unionizing at other companies.
We have spent most the last 50 years undoing all of the checks on corporate power that were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. There were literal pitched battles that happened when workers demanded their rights. Here's hoping the transition this time will be less painful (and actually gets repeated at all).
> If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.
These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
That's not at all what the statement I replied to says in context.
hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."
popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"
That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
What if that unfair exploitation is perfectly normal behavior in overseas markets that happen to be competing? I guess we've been over the consequences of the globalization-driven equilibrium ad nauseam so no need to harp on it but it's still unfortunate.
I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.
Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.
They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.
Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.
And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .
The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.
My point is exactly that the union didn't do what was best for its members because their actions collapsed the company.
Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.
Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
Looking through the history of the company, it seems like the lack of making a profit for the last 25 years and taking on huge debt may have contributed way more to their demise than anything the union did.
There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.
I work for a factory that produces a type of heavy machinery that is in extreme demand. Any person with any semblance of foresight, would understand that in the near to medium term, this will be the case.
During COVID, there was a large dip(~30%) of orders. In the infinite wisdom of our business leaders, it was decided to shut us down. Coincidentally, our equipment was (supposed to be) transferred to our step-sibling factory, where most of the upper management is from… I say step sibling, although we make similar products, we come together due to a merger.
6 months after our supposed shutdown, after a lot of equipment has been transferred and a lot of good people have gone, suddenly demand was back to normal, and our customer are no longer asking how much our product costs, but if they can have one… and it turns out, our step-sibling can’t make our product very well.
It’s all politics, short-sightedness and personal greed, in upper management, UNLESS MAYBE, they founded the company(and still a big IF).
Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.
I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.
If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman
Well, this economic downturn might have something to do with the games industry continuing to push out products that nobody wanted (or were no good in the first place) at absolutely lavish budgets. It didn't seemingly come out of nowhere.
Cue Concorde.
If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.
There are movie flops, yet also there is an actors union. Workers are allowed to be paid even if management makes bad decisions. The company can go bankrupt, doesn't mean workers shouldn't get paid.
Are being wages owed here? If so, the company either can't pay them, and should be considered bankrupt, or is unlawfully holding them back, in which case they should be sued.
The parent was implying a common argument that a union will drive a company out of business. I'm saying, if there are poor decisions that drive a company out of business, then employees should still be paid. It doesn't make sense that employees should prop up the company by taking a pay cut.
They did not, but since the parent comment alluded to there being financial trouble, I was just pointing out one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the AAA industry is not in a good spot right now, I remember there being an article that there was not a single AAA game at some point in the Steam Best Sellers list.
id and Bethesda isn't doing quite so badly, but their most recent games have been meh.
This is true, but there's still the problem of how things are distributed within the collective groups.
When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.
I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.
Unpopular opinion but I'm okay with treating union members better than non.
It's good to know that once you make it you are safe. It's okay to grind and give 110% on the come-up. Unsustainable drive, passion, fire. But there has got to be a point where you can ease off to giving 90%, even 85%.
Jobs are a part of society, and the society needs to create structures that make room for people to pull back and focus on other things like raising a family.
Not just unpopular, undesirable and unworkable. There's a reason unions have long opposed two-tier as a cynical divide-and-conquer management strategy.
Indeed what are you actually "okay with" here? Being on the upper tier, due to a strategy that explicitly wants to chip away at said tier until it's gone? When it goes away will that also be "okay"?
The way author was treated seem terrible, but I don't understad an accomplished composer would accept a contract where all penalties for deadline are on him, instead of having variable deadlines based on deliverables? And starts working before the contract is finalized but sign the contract with the original delivery dates, starting on a project already late?
The problem is that there is actually an abundance of resources available, they're just horribly imbalanced. There's an entire megathread complaining about RAM prices, and very few people have said "maybe one single person shouldn't be allowed to make computers expensive for the entire rest of the planet".
interesting to see in the replies such incredible pearl clutching on behalf of the poor, poor businesses whenever unionization gets brought up. brain folds lighting up like a fireworks show just to combat the idea of [checks scroll] uhh not exploiting workers.
When companies aren't doing well either, demanding more money will only result in bankrupt companies and out sourcing.
It's probably the worst time to do it.
I've only seen unions work well in the long-run with government jobs. The USPS is a good example. Mostly because you really can't fire the workers and the main entity won't ever go out of business because of government bailouts.
In professional sports, the player's union helps raise athlete salaries and improve working conditions and that does ultimately come out of the owner's pockets.
Easy counterexample: safety. Unions have historically been on the forefront of safety improvements. Not having workers mutilated or killed -> increased wealth for all. That's not a zero-sum game.
And if you think this doesn't matter for game programmers, look at how many overworked people in the past few years have gotten in car crashes while driving home. Fatigue kills.
I don't understand the video game industry from an insider perspective, but is it wise for id Software to unionize after Doom: The Dark Ages didn't do as well as Eternal? I haven't spoken to anyone who mentioned D:TDA IRL, but knew a fair amount of people who preordered Eternal.
I'm not a fan of parrying in any game and mentally put Eternal into the "Wait for cheap Steam sale" pile when I saw the shield. I wanna rip and tear in Doom.
I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this?
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.
This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
When people complain about game devs being exempt, I think they're usually not complaining that salaries are too low - they're generally fine these days - but the expectation of 80+ hour weeks during 'crunch' when crunch often lasts 6+ months. Doing hours like that for a long period of time is destructive to health and to family ties.
> This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.
Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
Btw what was the outcome of that?
AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
> a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
> Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.
The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.
If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
In the U.S. capital got sympathy striking illegalized as part of the Taft-Hartley Act around WWII, because labor exploiting network effects was just to unconscionable for the time.
People dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company.
Trying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.
I've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)
Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.
The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?
Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
If your work place has a long enough history, try comparing incidents on work days versus weekends or holidays. Typically the incident rate is dramatically lower when no one is making changes.
Totally true, but we host other people's code (PaaS, etc). We don't get to dictate their working hours.
It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.
It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
As a non gaming engineer, I dont want a union, what I really want is solid (really, harsh) enforcement of basic common sense labor rules for exempt workers like weekly working hour limits, no after hours scheduling or minimum notice/severance period for layoffs & many other abuses. Problem is tech industry does not wants to give an inch and workers don't complain because of higher pay and 'lottery ticket' effect.
I fear the time for fixing this is passing fast. Its because within a decade AI will have enough of labor displacement that labor wont have any negotiating leverage against capital. If this happens with union, so be it.
OK, so if you don't want a union, but you want to achieve goals which are typically fought for by unions, what exactly is the alternative mechanism you propose for achieving these goals?
This sounds to me like "I don't want memory protection, what I really want is for my computer to solidly enforce common sense memory barriers", or "I don't want defense attorneys, what I really want is courts to provide common sense advocacy for defendants". Somebody has to do the work, and you're naming the component of the system which provides the features you want.
The universe maximizes entropy, not common sense. The tech industry doesn't want to give an inch for the same reason a dropped object falls to earth: there is no force suggesting it do anything else.
Did you miss the last sentence or had your mind made up already by then?
the reason I don't want a typical union is because they work out well where there is a clear separation of labor & capital. labor get paid wages & capital makes money off the invested assets. problem with tech is that in a tech ventures labor is a part owner and capital too (engineer equity). introducing a 3rd party (unions & union leadership) in these situations will likely have the worst effect on the capital portion of labor & possibly eroding the incentives altogether. Imagine having a set of union rules to follow when distributing equity to early stage engineers? how do you decide equitable when by definition you are on cutting edge of tech & innovation. & if you think that wont happen you are mistaken, that is where the biggest pie is and unions arent exactly 'shining beacon of honesty and integrity' either. Look all I want is just some basic labor laws are followed and tech employees dont feel the panic when they hear slack-chime on a weekend night.
there are other mechanisms like state level enforcement of labor laws and punitive fines. you know the good old law enforcement. its really not so hard if you actually want to do it.
So you walk in to negotiate with your capitalist overlords with an equivalent number of lawyers that they can field? Oh, they don't pay you enough to do that? Oh, you need to be working while doing this? Oh, you just got replaced because the default T&C's weren't good enough for you?
You are not a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire/billionaire.
> Did you miss the last sentence or had your mind made up already by then?
Is the first sentence of your comment not your thesis? Or am I to read this as you changing your own mind during this comment? I'm confused. You literally started your comment with "I don't want a union".
> they work out well where there is a clear separation of labor & capital
Citation needed. I've studied a bit of labor history, and this is the first I've heard of such a claim. Unions work poorly when they are corrupt -- the same as any democratic system. I'm not aware of other categorical failures of collective bargaining. Please enlighten me.
> Imagine having a set of union rules to follow when distributing equity to early stage engineers? how do you decide equitable when by definition you are on cutting edge of tech & innovation.
I'm not sure what problem you think the union would create here. Equity is simply another form of compensation, and unions have dealt with non-salary compensation for decades (licensing, branding, likeness, etc). It's really not a problem.
If there are union rules that must be followed, then that would be your answer: you follow those rules. Isn't that strictly better than not having any rules, and simply getting whatever the CEOs/VCs give you? Historically, workers do much better in a union than without.
Union rules are created and voted on by its members. If the workers don't want rules regarding equity, they won't create any. If they do, then they would be worse off without a union to help enforce them.
> unions arent exactly 'shining beacon of honesty and integrity' either
They're democratic representation for workers, no more, no less. (Every time there's an election result someone doesn't like, I see "Ha, democracy isn't perfect, either!" comments from other countries. Yeah, zing, you got us.) Unions have proven to be a shining beacon compared to billionaire CEOs, for sure.
> Look all I want is just some basic labor laws are followed [...] you know the good old law enforcement. its really not so hard if you actually want to do it.
You're using generic "you" here as a linguistic trick. Workers want labor laws followed, but they're not the same people working in "good old law enforcement". Unions are the mechanism by which workers are effective at getting labor laws followed, and new laws passed.
You still have not proposed any alternative mechanism besides suggesting that people who have no incentive to do a thing should start doing a thing. You claim it's not hard. That may be the single hardest thing to do in this world.
The challenge with having good worker protection laws and high minimum wage is that at some point local labour becomes less competitive with foreign low cost options. Then you'll need tariffs or other import rules to keep your local industries alive.
Because it happend much longer ago. If the US wanted they could leapfrog that step and go straight to federal laws covering the same things. It's just that there is no majority that wants it.
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2.... I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
Let's try to be honest when we discuss this kind of thing; Unions are like people. They have unique agendas, unique executive decisionmaking trends, and affect their members differently.
No single union is 1:1 alike.
When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job.
He quit. He was a 15yrold teenager just trying ro have an after school job and he got squeezed.
Unions are not good.
Unions are not bad.
Unions are.
I am eager to see how this specific union engages with the game development industry.
Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.
People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.
All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."
I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).
Similarly, I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of immigration.
I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.
I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.
So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.
IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.
I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.
I think unions are great but they are deeply flawed, like any human organization, but for my family they really worked and both my parents had good jobs in unions. My dad's union both saved him from being fired and also tried to get him fired themselves (he pissed off an up and coming union leader who then proceeded to lie about him). They always seemed like an important counterweight more than actually a great organization (and you actually have a vote, unlike most companies).
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.
If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.
So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.
"Unions" are a broad category of human organization, like "business." It makes little sense to favor or oppose "business" in general, and similarly for "unions." I encourage everyone to better understand the specific organizations they support or oppose, unions or otherwise.
I encourage HN readers to read your username before replying to this comment. And also to consider why self-identifying capitalists like yourself might want a large cheap labor pool of people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions.
For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call ICE on native-born citizens for trying to unionize if they could.
The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.
Take it up with your fellow “caps” then, they’re the ones that support expanding this category of workers that have fewer political rights. The labor unions clearly only about immigration issues insofar as it relates to trying to weaken labor laws.
Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing.
An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment.
Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the cost of labor being too high for some employers, resulting in fewer jobs. Similarly, unions can prevent wages from adjusting to market conditions.
So for the common good, individuals may go without a job.
The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.
Unions are part of the market like anything else. If wages are higher, they aren't above market-clearing levels, those are the new market-clearing levels. If workers form a union and bargain collectively, that is what the market naturally set.
Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.
For markets to operate well, prices must be easily accessible by both buyers and sellers. Since corporations do their utmost to ensure that workers don't discover wages and salaries of their peers, corporations suppress wages. So, corporations are bad for the common good.
And I bet COSTCO membership-based, warehouse-club model is a bad thing too, since they are able to negotiate prices lower that what the market would naturally set?
Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.
In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.
Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.
And all the major American legacy car companies filing bankruptcy through the years and becoming completely uncompetitive. Welcome to your soon do you come greedy unionion reps That will ensure high performers will leave for better pastures and low to average performers will stay and benefit from collective bargaining,. Unions always increase friction and company politics and stunts growth. Growth is what is key to success of any company and its workers.
The problem is that unions are only as strong as the NLRB which depends on the current administration. One of Trump's first actions was firing of a democratic member making them unable to form quorum, so it's not looking good for the rest of his term and the supreme court is likely going to bless that firing making it even more susceptible to executive branch meddling in the future.
I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
as much as i hate tech bros that think the solution to every social problem is a new saas app, there are two pieces of tech that would be great for workers:
1) for people that aren't in a union, make labor lawyers easy to use. there could be an app used to walk you through gathering evidence about various workplace violations (osha/safety stuff, wage theft, etc) and then hook you up with lawyers in a two-sided marketplace. workers would get easy represenation, lawyers would get a stream of clients that show up with a nicely formatted bundle of evidence. it could even work to find conneted cases could get bundled into class actions.
2) when everybody worked in the same office/shop floor, you could easily commiserate and start discussions about unionization and collective action. if you're an app-mediated gig-worker (uber drivers, door-dashers, etc) you don't know how to connect with your coworkers. there needs to be a social platform where people would be able to make these connections. to do this, you'd need a way to verify that users are actual employees and put in various protections to make sure management isn't spying on them.
Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.
An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.
The first one lends itself to a revenue model really naturally, but I think it’d be hard to make number two into a business. It’s not clear how to monetize it while also maintaining a really high degree of trust
The featured article today on Wikipedia's Main Page is "Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons," iD's pre-DOOM side-scroller. I like when Wikipedia editors land on subtle topicality with featured articles and images; it makes it more fun to check the page everyday.
This is good news. I'd take it even further. I would like to see a requirement for responsibility in the code we write, like Civil Engineers have.
We have no way of defending our jobs. If we build it and it breaks, it's on us. If we find it unsafe, and provide alternatives that cost more / take longer our job is on the line.
If we feel we cannot humanly review the insane amount of AI slop PRs coming in, because we have a sense of ownership, because it is OUR name on the document, it's on us.
Holy bejesus, mandatory knitting classes incoming? They will go down the drain sooner rather than later. What have they done with modern doom, the infantilization, the totally mindwashed, empty shell or a story... Sigh.
I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Automotive plants have large factories, but when the primary assets are intangible intellectual property, I don’t understand how much power a union really has.
Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.
That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.
Not necessarily - many games have custom engines underpinned by a decade of arcane tech that you wont find anywhere in the world outside the company.
It sucks both for you and the company if they have to replace you.
In contrast, if you work building SaaS apps on top of k8s, you can both transfer your skills easily, and the company can replace you easier.
It could go both ways, but in practice it usually turns out that if your skills are transferable you make more money.
This thing also popped up in the gaming industry, with Unreal becoming popular, and people using it making much more and jumping between projects, because their skills are transferable.
Federal law makes it illegal to retaliate against people for forming a union. Companies still do, and there's no law saying they have to keep hiring in that unit, but if they fire everyone they will probably lose the resulting lawsuit.
It's probably even more effective than other industries. Most industries you have good/bad workers but in software there is a few engineers where you cannot lose them. Who cares about scabs/replacements/etc. like literally no one has their specific domain knowledge.
> I don’t understand what gives the union power at the end of the day when the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone.
Gamers are very passionate about their games and the companies behind them. They are also very anti-AI, pro consumer rights, and pro unions. At least the vocal majority of gamers, such as on /r/games, which is where a good portion of gaming journalists get their takes.
It would be the end of id Software from a PR standpoint if they fired union developers responsible for their beloved titles, specifically the recent DOOM titles. The bad PR would also extend to ZeniMax, Bethesda, and Microsoft.
That said, gamers are also the worst at voting with their wallet. Despite all the bad union PR Rockstar North is receiving, pretty much everyone in support of the fired employees will probably still end up buying GTA6 because of FOMO and hype.
Deprived of all options by the manifest oppression of the Republican Party, American youths of today face the grim choice between shoplifting Louis Vuitton below their AG’s prosecution threshold or working several hours a week in the shadow of the menacing smokestacks of ID Software to afford their meager iPhones. Affluent Ugandans make monthly donations to American charities who will send them pictures of smiling American 20-something’s named “Jaden” their charity has lifted out of complete destitution and given hope of owning their own Miami condo.
I think it's both - while game devs experience more hardship than regular devs do, I'd say they still constitute an insanely fortunate slice of society, not exactly Oliver Twist.
From the article, remote work seems to be the crux of the issue - I do think devs should get it but the pity party they hold for themselves is kinda tone deaf imo
Why wouldn't you defend the executives. They lead the company, so they have the power to make decisions on how it should operate. They will always have the power to choose how it operates union or not. Forming a union is just a power grab for the union.
Hello beuracracy, regulated relationships, and workaday droneness. What a shame for a company that has such a legacy of strong independent minded developers but that is the past.
Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.
Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.
A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood. Some terms from TAG's standard contract:
All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]
This encourages management to schedule realistically. The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.
[1] https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-developers-te...
[2] https://code-cwa.org/
[3] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2024-2...