News UK games industry gets its first union

When films and music are unioned up the yin yang it surprises me that games have so little representation for their workforce. Doubly so when when dev contracts seem to be geared up to keep those who mae the game as far removed from the income it will generate as possible. If Disney were to fire it's prop makers a week before the next Marvel movie, having promised bonuses on release, they would be in court by the week's end, yet it's considered routine within games. To say nothing of the prevailing trend of working 50+ hour weeks at all times, but being paid for 40 regardless.

Good luck to them, I wonder what move will be made to prevent them gaining traction, there'll be something.

 

Unions work when you have big companies, and static work force's that don't change jobs. It also requires most people to be in the union or if not that the union to apply real pressure to non-union people. Here we have little companies where everybody changes job ever other year. Most programmers have no interest in being unionised so if union workers make a fuss they just hire someone else, and you can't really picket some tiny little gaming office. Even if you succeeded they'd probably just can the game or go bust so everyone would loose their jobs anyway.

I suppose it does give minorities some legal backing - so I guess if you were one of them you'd effectively be paying an insurance fee for a lawyer if stuff goes pear shaped. That said most software engineers are middle class and pretty liberal - most would be mortified if you accused them of sexism or racism. The fact that most are male is because women don't want to be software engineers - which is not oppression of women, in fact it's probably the opposite - they are free to choose not to be software engineers. For example if you go to a more oppressive society you'll actually find more women go down the maths/engineering branches then in a free-er one.

 

If you are Indian and you are good at languages and maths, you'll be told to do STEM at higher education because that's where the jobs are even if you prefer the humanities. If you live in the uk you are told you are free to choose whatever you enjoy, even if you don't get such a good job, it doesn't matter that much. Hence we have loads of people, predominantly women doing humanities at higher education.

It's different at GCSE you'll find loads of girls doing really well at maths/physics, but come to A-level it's nearly all boys doing maths/physics, and those smart girls pick english, psychology or the more medical sciences (biology, chemistry) because that's what interests them. So even the girls doing STEM are mostly doing the Science part of it, not Technology, Engineering or Maths. There's loads of "how do we get girls to do maths" type articles, but they all avoid the obvious way which is to force them which is what happens in oppressive societies.

There is a couple of links above which if you click the charts you'll see things like the highest percentage of women in science is in Iran. A massively repressive society for women - how can they manage it but in the uk/us where they are given every chance we get articles like you linked blaming sexism? Perhaps because they are not given a choice. In Europe you'll find that it's mainly poorer countries where women do science, and richer countries where they don't. Perhaps because a chance to lift yourself out of poverty with a STEM degree is more important then doing what you enjoy.

 

Because in general they like the STEM subjects less then the humanities ones, they are particularly less keen on the ones that only involve interaction with machines and not people. Given freedom of choice most women pick subject that involve more personal interaction, even in STEM you'll see them become doctors, or criminal psychologists, or teachers. Men and women are different, they are allowed to like different things, and that's a strength not a weakness. It's mostly men sitting in basements trying to code silly games, or tinkering with car engines, or building robots to go on robot wars.

This agenda where we all have to be the same and act the same and have 50% of each sex in each job is a lie. If women want to code that's great, and despite what your articles say they have every opportunity in the uk - I have never worked anywhere that would discriminate against women, in fact most are trying to get a more diverse workforce because women who code are seen as different and diversity is a strength. No school or university would ever discriminate against women doing STEM subjects. However fact is most given a choice would just have more fun doing something else.

 

I'm not disagreeing with the rest of what you've said, men and women being wired differently in the noggin and all that, however how do we know something is more 'fun' because of the wiring in the noggin and not because there's a bunch of blokes being blokes, farting, burping, stinking up the place and making sexist comments because they're around loads of other blokes.

In other words how do we know a job is less 'fun' not because of the job itself but because of the people within it?

 

The game industry has worked long and hard to nip any attempt at unionizing in the bud, and had the historical precedent of the film and music industries to guide them.

 

I'm rather surprised they used the word 'union' as that word's become pretty toxic of late, shouldn't they have called it an 'arrangement' or something.