Hello,

So for my new day job, I'm part of a union. It sounds pretty good. For the most part it feels like there is no down sides, for the general workforce.

But. I'm not in management.

I can easily imagine unions being an entire beast of an issue for management.

There are no unions in games yet, what are your thoughts?

Should there be unions?

how should it be handled?

For FT employees, I think unionization might be the answer to a number of mainstream industry wrongs, like crunch and sexual harassment and gender inequity. For indie devs, though, the usefulness seems questionable. Because of the many parallels with the film industry, look to how there are guilds for actors, writers, and producers, and what the guilds do and what needs they serve. Like keeping health insurance constant throughout project changes, like wage standards, like credits, like even retirement plans.

Collective bargaining is an important negotiating tactic for any coordinated group of employees if working conditions are no longer worthwhile.

It is natural for management to have trouble with unions, it's a fundamentally antagonistic relationship, no matter the feel-good workplace vibes. All economic actors seek to get as much as they can while spending as little as they can. Sometimes employers offer perks and incentives to squeeze some more motivation/productivity out of employees, but make no mistake, it's only in their own self-interest. Employees should not feel constrained to not maximize their own interests as well.

Game Development is a sufficiently skilled field that they are often paid competitive wages already instead of competing from a large unskilled labor pool, so devs have never really felt the economic push towards unionization, even if they would generally benefit from it. But I think you only need to look towards the VFX workers, similar skills in punishing turnarounds and conditions, and their union efforts to get a sense of the difficulties.

In general, the higher the cost of labor, the more the industry will seek to off-shore or turn to other solutions, AI being an emerging tool.

One of the biggest problems I have never seen a good solution for is the levels of specialization.

The trades are an ideal scenario for unions and collective action. The work overall is standard and people inside a tier are mostly interchangeable. You need a water heater replacement, or a light fixture swapped, or a stone fireplace built, there are standards for the work and you can create standard pricing.

It is less true in our industry. Creative fields struggle with assigning value, and individual skills are rarely interchangeable. Some roles are more able to get clustered, “gameplay engineering in Unreal with x years experience”, but then details matter. Physics? Audio? Networking? Build tools? Graphics? Systems engineering? Throw specialties in there and it gets a little more complex. Add in the work that is not standardized, and you get even more complex in how to evaluate and assign rates and wages.

People in tech companies are less interchangeable than trades. The lists of major tools and technologies are quite long, and even someone who is an expert at making games in a platform or system can go to a new environment, look around, and realize they know little or nothing about the tools on the new project even though it uses the same base platforms as their past experience. They have years doing it with certain tools, but the company uses a different api or language or toolset that doesn't relate.

Big companies are different from mid-sized and smaller business and startups. The work being done varies tremendously. Pay scales and what companies can afford varies, laws vary by location. Demand and expectations vary by role and experience. Scope of work, difficulty of individual differences in work, and people's history all matter.

There is also supply and demand, people in demand who know it can often command much higher wages and benefits, something that movie guilds have worked out with agency rates and negotiated rates. It is not worked out in our industry.

There are plenty of problems that a union or guild could help with, but they also have many difficulties they introduce which don't have good solutions yet.

The model for game industry unionization is The Animation Guild, ITASE Local 839. They represent most Hollywood animators. (Which today means mostly Disney, since Disney acquired everybody). Animation used to be very different from game dev, but today, game content creators and animators are using much the same tools and skills. The working conditions for animators are better, though.

Key contract terms include:

• There are minimum wages for each type of work, but no maximum.
• There's a pension plan, it's been around for many decades, and has survived the demise of many animation studios.
• Overtime is taken very seriously. Film work has “crunches”, too, but the pay goes through the roof as time and a half and double time kick in. This is why film scheduling is a discipline and game scheduling is a joke.
• There's a “minimum call” of 4 hours. If you get a phone call on a weekend to do something, that's 4 hours of pay.

TAG has tried in the past to organize game developers, but has not succeded. Now that game dev and movie production are becoming more and more closely linked, it might be time to start. Here's their “how to start a union” page.