I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
Related topic: People Make Games has had really great coverage on Rockstar's illegal firing of the developers working on GTA 6 because of their unionization efforts
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
I hate unions, but I've noticed they only form when there's some sort of abuse. Treat employees well, and this isn't a problem.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight
A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.
My big gripe with unions is the unwavering protection of their worst performing members.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
I doubt you'll find many people in favor of how bad cops get protected by police unions either. At least in the US I'd much rather a broad social net so my health care and retirement weren't so directly tied to my job than a union specific to my trade.
The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
Presumably employees were unhappy. It's rare that unions spring up when everyone is treated well and paid fairly.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.
All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.
This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.
Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.
Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.
It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.
This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.
A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.
Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.
I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.
It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
They might have been declining since then, but more recently I'd point to when they introduced Dr. Who, Transformers, My Little Pony, and a whole bunch of other crap into a game about wizards fighting in a fantasy world.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
Awful news and a sign that WOTC has lost control of the company. The writing has been on the wall for WOTC for a while now, and this will exacerbate their decline. Amazing how unionists seize the body of their host when it is weakest.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.
Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.
Found the Pinkerton bot account lmao. It's confusing why tech people are so suspicious of unions. We all benefit from unions even if we're not in them...
You say he's a bot because he's suspicious of unions, yet you acknowledge plenty of tech people are suspicious of unions. Seems like you dont think he's a bot at all and you're just trying to delegitimize his viewpoint without actually confronting it.
It's likewise confusing when people think unions are always A Good Thing no matter what in all circumstances.
I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.
Any time people want to unionize, it's good for the customers even if it means the business goes under.
Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.
Not sure about "all." High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
> High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
High earners benefit from unions if union rules are made which benefit high earners.
The most well-known example of a high-earner union is SAG-AFTRA and they provide benefits to established performers, the big one being name exclusivity. e.g. even if your real life birth certificate says your name is "Tom Cruise" you cannot advertise your name as "Tom Cruise". Obviously, actors are still negotiating their own pay.
Another good one is the NFL Players Association which capped the rookie pay scale in 2011 to ensure the salary cap was going more toward veterans, people already in the union. However they still independently negotiate their compensation.
I don't know what people would want out of a tech union specifically but the idea that "union = payscale based on seniority" just plain isn't true.
I'm glad to see this.
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
Related topic: People Make Games has had really great coverage on Rockstar's illegal firing of the developers working on GTA 6 because of their unionization efforts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuipPQDd_w
Somewhat related, this book is pretty good: https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/
It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.
Back when Arena was first announced, there was an interesting line in their write-up:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
I'm actually working on this right now! https://chiplis.com/ironsmith
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
I think on the contrary somewhat
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
Well, it happens that the company that has workers on strike at some point stops making money because of that.
I hate unions, but I've noticed they only form when there's some sort of abuse. Treat employees well, and this isn't a problem.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight
The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".)
The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.
My big gripe with unions is the unwavering protection of their worst performing members.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_center
I doubt you'll find many people in favor of how bad cops get protected by police unions either. At least in the US I'd much rather a broad social net so my health care and retirement weren't so directly tied to my job than a union specific to my trade.
The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
Well, unions do not exist to keep people entrenched on their jobs. That perspective is propaganda (by you-know-who).
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
How does an experienced teacher or pilot differ from an experienced game designer?
Presumably employees were unhappy. It's rare that unions spring up when everyone is treated well and paid fairly.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
What is the Arena team? Looks like the team that makes the Magic The Gathering video game?
Arena is WotC's video game version of Magic the Gathering, yeah. Notably it's got microtransactions and such for opening packs of cards.
TBF, that's just kind of built into the product naturally.
There are several MTG video-games. In this case, it's "Magic: The Gathering Arena"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic%3A_The_Gathering_Arena
I had one that came on a cd. I played that for ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_(1997_vid...
From the full letter[1]:
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter
Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.
Most? No. Many, sure.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.
Do you have any figures that show it's _most_? I sure hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised either.
Finding one that doesn't would be very hard.
All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.
This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Yes, but you have to declare them to the company and the company must approve them. If they don’t, because it’s competitive, you’re out of luck.
I’ve seen this done as a carve-out or exception that has to be explicitly documented. Trouble is that documentation is not presented as simple.
The relevance isn’t wholly work hours but rather “work for hire,” I.e. if it’s in the scope of your paid responsibilities.
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.
Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
It's not at all uncommon, and important.
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.
Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.
It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.
This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.
That's not correct. "Arbeitnehmererfindungen" only apply to inventions you make as part of your paid work. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitnehmererfindung
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
When I was looking for my last job a company wanted me to sign something similar to that. I declined their offer and got a job elsewhere instead.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.
A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.
Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.
Google has a similar clause in their employee contracts. I assume most tech companies do.
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.
Pretty common actually.
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.
It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
It’s very enforceable.
WOTC has been on a downward trend since the Hasbro acquisition.
They might have been declining since then, but more recently I'd point to when they introduced Dr. Who, Transformers, My Little Pony, and a whole bunch of other crap into a game about wizards fighting in a fantasy world.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
That was 27 years ago. They were only founded 9 years before that.
The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D
D&D is famously not more popular than ever and is one of the reasons why so many OSR's have exploded in popularity over the past 5-10 years.
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
It's their house now, and it's fine.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
Great to see! I think unions should be the default for most situations.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
Yea it is odd. Bc then tech workers get fired on mass just to get a little boost in stock price. And yet many don't think we need a union...
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
And they are in much of Europe! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, etc. Even France has over 80% coverage
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
Awful news and a sign that WOTC has lost control of the company. The writing has been on the wall for WOTC for a while now, and this will exacerbate their decline. Amazing how unionists seize the body of their host when it is weakest.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.
Stability of development, features etc is to the customer's benefit.
Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.
Unions rarely form because everyone is being treated well (humanely) and/or paid appropriately.
The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?
Found the Pinkerton bot account lmao. It's confusing why tech people are so suspicious of unions. We all benefit from unions even if we're not in them...
You say he's a bot because he's suspicious of unions, yet you acknowledge plenty of tech people are suspicious of unions. Seems like you dont think he's a bot at all and you're just trying to delegitimize his viewpoint without actually confronting it.
It's likewise confusing when people think unions are always A Good Thing no matter what in all circumstances.
I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.
Any time people want to unionize, it's good for the customers even if it means the business goes under.
Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.
Not sure about "all." High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
> High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
High earners benefit from unions if union rules are made which benefit high earners.
The most well-known example of a high-earner union is SAG-AFTRA and they provide benefits to established performers, the big one being name exclusivity. e.g. even if your real life birth certificate says your name is "Tom Cruise" you cannot advertise your name as "Tom Cruise". Obviously, actors are still negotiating their own pay.
Another good one is the NFL Players Association which capped the rookie pay scale in 2011 to ensure the salary cap was going more toward veterans, people already in the union. However they still independently negotiate their compensation.
I don't know what people would want out of a tech union specifically but the idea that "union = payscale based on seniority" just plain isn't true.