Why is IGDA against unionization?

Stray_Train

I was reading this article and it just doesn't make sense to me. It's known that the games industry is really tough and the lack of any sort of workers union isn't making things easier. Is there some downside I'm missing?

TheFuntastic

Well as the article says the people who chair the IDGA are from management layer in the games industry and thus unionisation is a conflict of interest. Don't know if thats the whole story or not though.

I definitely agree the soul grinder that is the games industry is a pretty evil and despicable thing in some quarters and I hope anyone in that situation finds their way to a better place (from a short term death march crunch survivor). A union would actually be a good thing as far as I can tell, but it would probably only accelerate the geographical spread of game studios to places without unions and cheaper pay checks. This is what's happening with Hollywood with sfx studios as far as I'm aware.

As one of those potential cheaper places, I'm not sure how I feel about it. But hey local industry growth is probably a good thing.

dislekcia

The IGDA has been criticized for quite a while about it's stances on various things. But as far as unions go, I'm sure that the major reason is that the IGDA is supposed to speak and advocate for developers like a union would, without the collective bargaining power that unions focus on employing to get their demands met. Basically, the IGDA is a play-nice halfway step between big game companies and game workers, except it seems to be heavily skewed towards benefiting the big game companies instead of supporting workers. Unions tend to be the other way around. If game worker unions were set up, I think the IGDA feels that their membership would decline and the fees they claim would end up going elsewhere.

There's also a possible angle of game workers seeing themselves as white collar workers and thus "above" unionising. Plus the US has a long history of socially demonising unions and collective bargaining in what can only be seen as a concerted effort to undermine the power of workers in favor of large companies, but that's a pretty obvious US problem that they're going to have to start dealing with as a social issue pretty soon. Occupy and the dissatisfaction with the 1% movements are indicators of a trend, I feel...

TLDR: IGDA wants fees, unions are seen as bad in the US, IGDA sees unions as competition/morally worrying. Don't think they're right myself.

mattbenic

Great article, the education angle is one I wasn't aware of stateside (though to a lesser degree we see the same thing happening here).

Even if the crash isn’t crushing, the burnout level means that people with real experience are replaced with people without it, all to keep wages low and hours high – leading to increasingly shoddy games.

So true, even here we see it. There are probably less than ten of us in SA that have stuck it out in games for over ten years.. partly because the others had the common sense to go and do something that pays double :) The result-losing all that experience as an industry-can only be bad for the quality of released games.