Unions work when there is a shortage in skilled potential employees and a long learning ramp-up period. Unions work not very well when there is a glut of skilled people, or there are enough people with lower skills willing to take a lower pay rate (or where that lower pay rate is considered well-paid). There is no shortage of people who want to work in the game industry. There is a sorta shortage in people who know game engines in and out, and people who don't need to refer constantly to API references... people who put in 35-40 hour work weeks competing with people willing to put in 45 hour work weeks are generally at a disadvantage.
Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult.
Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less.
The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it.
Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.
One main reason is they are not selling as much in China.
> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
Not quite true, the CEO has to go and convince the owners this makes sense, the owners include various labour representatives who can veto it forcing VW to slowly die.
It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
Hey, I don't want to rule all of society! I'd just like to be able to contribute to it meaningfully. Rewriting some corporate app from React to Flutter, replacing one set of bugs with another, is not a good use of resources. I can do so much more! … but the people most in need of my skills do not have the money to pay for my food, housing and electricity, even if I were to forego all other luxuries.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
Rule's maybe too strong a word, but knowing that you have all the good ideas and wanting to structure everything to support those good ideas... it's not a bad word for it.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.