For whatever reason it's a huge thing in video game studios all the sudden.
I have worked at a large consulting firm for close to 20 years and unions have never been a thing. Not even a topic of discussion. We have our core group of developers and we hire contractors for certain projects as needed. We are treated extremely well and our benefits are phenomenal. It's only on the internet that I ever hear this woe is me bullshit.
Worked in finance my whole life and never seen it or heard about it. Never seen a finance department fire all their vets and purposely rehire only young cheap university grads because they are a fraction of the salary.
It's a big deal in gaming now because budgets and salaries are through the roof, games take forever to be made, and quality is hit and miss. So are sales and profits. So the workers got a taste for the good life and want to keep it forever.
Kind of like pro athletes who are overpaid or do a bad job. They got gifted a contract to perform well, but tanked. But they negotiate no trade and no movement clauses making it hard for the team to get rid of them because they want to make sure they still get paid great and dont get traded or sent down to the minors for a bad job. They want the team to still keep paying them and playing them sinking the team.
So workers need a union to protect their asses from getting fired for a bad job. Unless a company is going broke or there's redundancies, companies will typically only fire the shitty people because it makes no sense for a company to purposely fire good workers making good products leading to good sales and profits.
You can tell it's a grift because lots of union contracts protecting workers often bases it on seniority, not quality of work. So if there is a round of corporate layoffs, the less experienced people get fired first even if they are good people. So the longer you can hold a job the harder it is to fire you unless there's so many firings it actually catches up to their tenure tier. They do this to hold onto the budget and salaries because they know it gets to a point they are overpaid. Anything for a buck.
The funniest part is when I worked at one of my old companies and the unionized warehouse staff and office staff worked at the same facility. Office in one part, warehouse and shipping downstairs. We were trying to make the month or quarter shipping stuff out and our VP told any of us with warehouse experience (me included with forklift experience) to go down and help wrap skids and load product into trucks because the warehouse guys were falling behind.
So a bunch of us go downstairs to see what's going. You got all these fuckers taking their time chatting with zero effort. No wonder loading trucks to get rid of them so the other trucks waiting to back up to the dock is taking forever. So we get down there and I could easily handle wrapping skids using the automated spinner. But the warehouse manager who wanted help told us we had to go back as union rules say only they can do the work. Were not here to take over your jobs. Were just here to help move product over these last few days because you fucks are taking forever with no urgency. So what happened is the warehouse/shipping manager probably told his staff some office people are going to come down and help and the union staff freaked out complaining. And some of the office staff that went downstairs to help even originated from the warehouse as they transitioned to an office role doing inventory/PO/invoice kind of roles. So they know these people well whereas I'm never in the warehouse. Even these people got turned back.
For those of you who have never worked in a warehouse, it's easy as hell learning how to drive a forklift, wrap skids (hand wrapped or using automated spinning machine), order picking, and doing case counts to ensure the skid of products going out matches the PO. Learned how to do all this shit at a university summer job making $10/hr.
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