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.
> somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery"
I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes, because my entire point is that the outcome doesn't matter: at some threshold value and below, the existence of the org itself is immoral. We don't have to agree on where that point is, but its existence shouldn't be up for debate, IMO.
I hope we can all agree that a slave plantation should not exist in 2025, regardless of whether it's making billions in quarterly profit, or hovering above insolvency. Paying workers at this plantation $0.01 per hour isn't okay, either, but if you keep adding $0.01/hr N times (and incrementally improve working conditions), you'll eventually arrive at the threshold I was describing.
Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management?
There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.
I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations.
> Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure.
Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
> Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company.
This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.
A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.
The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
Current US law forces companies to negotiate with a union if it's employees vote for it. That seems like the opposite of a healthy market; it is a market in severe regulatory capture.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal.
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.
That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
> That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.
Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.
I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.
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.
Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.
The logical conclusion of the scenario being floated here is that if enough workers resist their own exploitation, the "job creators" will take their capital and go... somewhere. And then there will be no jobs.
(Obviously I'm being facetious. There will, of course, be jobs. And also, a lot of capital owners sitting on the sidelines, debt payments incoming with no income stream.)
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.
Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.
Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.
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.
It's not just about dollar amounts, it's about security and consequences. If a developer finds out that he got laid off his life is completely upended. If the CEO of microsoft finds out that the subsidiary of a subsidiary goes under, his life doesn't change. One of those two people is in a position of power so much greater than the other that they have absolutely nothing to fear from having to treat a small number of twice removed employees a little more fairly.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
>You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
That is as true as saying "work hard and produce good value and you wont get fired, if you are fired I have a lot more suspicion on the worker than the manager".
Sure most of the time people are fired for good reasons and most of the time people strike for good reasons, but not always.
Why would they be terrified of a handful of employees just for having the ability to influence the company? The point of a union is to improve working conditions and job security, not to murder your bosses and kill off the company. Funny thing about workers is that they like having jobs, especially ones where they have any influence at all. If a company is fearful that treating workers a little more fairly will sink them, the company deserves to go under.
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’d entrain notions past certain thresholds (60+ hr weeks for months on end seems excessive for instance) should come with certain protections/minimum extras of some sort. A few guardrails, even if only to protection extremes seems pragmatic and not too controversial imo.
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.
An employer can't fire people for unionizing, but there's no law that requires them to accept a union's negotiating demands... Or prevents them from bringing in scabs if the union chooses to strike without pay.
The existence of a union by itself doesn't do anything.
The only power that a union actually has is not showing up to work. And when the union doesn't show up to work, the employer is free to hire someone else to do the work. It's wild to comparing people not showing up to work because an employment agreement hasn't been reached to 'being held hostage'.
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.
> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.
> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.
> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
Do you have evidence that Id is being subject to some sort of no poach deal?
Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.
Doesn't need it to justify unionizing. Unionizing is a right, and it was previously not exercised because there was no evidence of the will of the market to defraud or conspire against workers. It is now written plain for all to see that indeed, these types of arrangements are kept in board members back pockets. It is not their job to protect a companies interest in renumeration execs and shareholders. It is their job to get their share in spite of the management class's proven track records of the proclivity to engage in shenanigans and lies.
The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
You're asking me to prove a negative. Bosses at other companies have been caught locking employees in factories and physically preventing them from leaving.
Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.
You are correct. Unions do not exist to exploit employers, they exist precisely to make working conditions acceptable (livable) and no more, most of the time. There are outliers, like Police unions, which have ulterior motives, but on the whole it is a labor movement meant to prevent the abhorrent conditions to which capitalism naturally backslides, which we saw after the industrial revolution.
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.
"In July 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed against Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric and other U.S. nuclear plant operators, alleging that they conspired to suppress and coordinate worker pay for thousands of employees dating back to 2003. This lawsuit claims the companies acted together to keep wages low, which plaintiffs allege violates antitrust law"
"In a landmark verdict on April 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division notched its first-ever jury trial conviction for criminal wage-fixing under the Sherman Act in United States v. Eduardo Lopez in the District of Nevada. A home health care staffing executive, Eduardo (“Eddie”) Lopez, was found guilty of (1) conspiring with several competing home healthcare staffing agencies to fix the wages of home health nurses in the Las Vegas area, and..."
https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/doj-secure...
Is there any evidence that wage fixing is happening at Id?
Again, bosses kidnapping employees and holding them by force is extensively documented. But posting a bunch of stories to that effect doesn't matter for the topic at hand unless one of those is 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?
Because people replied to my statement that Id employees are free to accept competing jobs elsewhere claiming that that employees at Id don't have that ability. It sure looks like this claim is baseless.
This isn't a court of law. This is real life, bucko. You don't operate for your own protection on the good faith you think the rest of the world has for you, you plan on capabilities. What you call baseless, is you screaming into world that "you can't prove it, therefore it isn't". Wrong. We have eyes. We have seen the nature of the people we share the world with, and it tells us, that these bastards will happily collude if they think they won't get caught. They got caught doing it before when they had the benefit of good faith. It is 100% valid that the labor force integrate the learning with regards to capital's tendency to duplicity into their operating loop. I will no longer engage with attempts to convince the uninitiated to close their eyes and "just trust bro". Well over a decade being that guy and getting used.
If you're a junior, or someone trying to get into the field. I can't tell you the right path. But I can tell you, the people with the purse strings care only about that purse, and parting with as little of it's contents as possible, and getting as much out of you in the process of doing it. I can tell you I made the decision over 10 years ago to go the non-organized route. It worked. For a while. But at great personal cost medically, and likewise when I inevitably had to make the choice between becoming the better cog for the market, or being there for the people who matter most to me.
Don't delude yourselves. Organize. The people hiring you do. You must as well. Organize enough, and we as a society may finally recalibrate enough to achieve a new equilibrium that doesn't involve mulching each other for the sake of Mammon and Moloch.
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.
You’re reading an extra claim into it. It’s not saying “all post-union failures prove exploitation.” It’s saying “if survival requires unfair exploitation, then losing that advantage exposes an illegitimate model.”
I see no implication that all failing businesses after unionization is due to exploitation.
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.