Id Software Devs Form "wall-to-Wall" Union
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The news that Id Software devs have formed a "wall-to-wall" union with 165 workers voting in favor has sparked a lively debate about the role and potential of unions in the tech industry. Commenters are weighing in on the challenges of bootstrapping the unionization process, with some pointing out that software engineers have historically been resistant to unions when they had more bargaining power. As one commenter noted, unions can't avoid politics entirely, since their bosses already shape politics to suit their interests, while others argue that unions should focus solely on worker power. The discussion highlights the complexities of unionization in the tech industry, where the consequences of strikes or layoffs can be very different from those in traditional manufacturing or farming.
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But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many looked at their salary, read some libertarian propaganda, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it.
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
I don't know.
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues.
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
[1] https://www.equalrights.org/news/eeocs-decision-to-drop-lgbt...
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
Remember, unions are democratic organizations, they do what their members want. It turns out union members want comprehensive protections against discrimination in the workplace.
If the protection of workers' rights triggers someone, perhaps unions aren't for them and they'd be better off joining a club or something.
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...
Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
[0] Ala https://xkcd.com/545/
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
Also initially they had a lot of breakage.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
That collapse didn't happen.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/ComputerSoftware.htm
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
You: That's ridiculous! We need one universal union that covers everyone's needs. Yeah!
Situation: There are 15 competing unions.
The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.
If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
Y'all, if you want to stop being laid off despite the continued largess of your executives amidst record-breaking profits (how expensive is that new laptop in your shopping cart? Oh, it jumped 50% overnight?), you have basically two options: you can lie down and take it (and stop complaining online about it), or you can have a little solidarity with your fellow worker and you can organize. I know, your TC is $400,000 or whatever (including RSUs, naturally), but that won't matter when you get laid off and nobody is hiring and your rent is due. Hopefully you have savings, but how long will that last?
You are not in the same class of people as the ones who control your job. You simply aren't. You can either learn that before you get fired, or you can learn it after, but it sucks way harder to learn it after.
I don't think people here truly understand how much people are struggling, even other software developers. I think everyone here thinks every other programmer pulls six figures working at a FAANG, but it's not true. Except now, capital is out for blood, and the Palo Alto is the only place with some fat left to trim.
Please look to the EU and their --ZERO-- level of tech innovation and how their anti-business regulations have worked out.
Unions don’t prevent innovation.
Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.
These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
Whether that's due to constant turnover from poor treatment of their employees, or due to union strikes, doesn't change the statement.
hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."
popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"
That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
I see no implication that all failing businesses after unionization is due to exploitation.
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
Sure most of the time people are fired for good reasons and most of the time people strike for good reasons, but not always.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
See HN discussion of 996: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
I think unions have a place in the lowest margins , but not the 996 tech worker making 2x median salary (my assumption).
Is that the bar we want a corporate environment to meet? No unfair exploitation of anyone ever?
If so, the existing structures sure as shit don't meet it. Why carry water for them?
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.
* Employer-bound health insurance in the US
* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members
* Noncompetes and NDAs
* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers
Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.
This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?
> Noncompetes
Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.
Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.
> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.
> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees
If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.
People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.
Maybe they can just start their own company. Well, you can't for the existing players to peer traffic with you if you need heavy network access.
Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.
The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
I'm asking people who are insisting that Id employees are not free to accept competing offers to back up those claims with evidence.
How many of these collusions have not been brought to light?
Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.
Oh wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Quit the gaslighting.
Why should there be evidence ? They have a right to be pro-active and protect themselves from the C-suite.
If you're a junior, or someone trying to get into the field. I can't tell you the right path. But I can tell you, the people with the purse strings care only about that purse, and parting with as little of it's contents as possible, and getting as much out of you in the process of doing it. I can tell you I made the decision over 10 years ago to go the non-organized route. It worked. For a while. But at great personal cost medically, and likewise when I inevitably had to make the choice between becoming the better cog for the market, or being there for the people who matter most to me.
Don't delude yourselves. Organize. The people hiring you do. You must as well. Organize enough, and we as a society may finally recalibrate enough to achieve a new equilibrium that doesn't involve mulching each other for the sake of Mammon and Moloch.
There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.
Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?
And it sure looks like the answer is "no".
Why shouldn't Id employees be smart and protect themselves in a job market currently going bad for IT ?
Regarding the US in general, wage-fixing is still pretty common
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-nuclear-plant-op...
"In July 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed against Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric and other U.S. nuclear plant operators, alleging that they conspired to suppress and coordinate worker pay for thousands of employees dating back to 2003. This lawsuit claims the companies acted together to keep wages low, which plaintiffs allege violates antitrust law"
"In a landmark verdict on April 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division notched its first-ever jury trial conviction for criminal wage-fixing under the Sherman Act in United States v. Eduardo Lopez in the District of Nevada. A home health care staffing executive, Eduardo (“Eddie”) Lopez, was found guilty of (1) conspiring with several competing home healthcare staffing agencies to fix the wages of home health nurses in the Las Vegas area, and..." https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/doj-secure...
"Hagens Berman: $200.2 Million in Settlements Reached in Lawsuit Accusing Red Meat Processing Industry of Wage-Fixing" https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240909921707/en/Hag...
Again, bosses kidnapping employees and holding them by force is extensively documented. But posting a bunch of stories to that effect doesn't matter for the topic at hand unless one of those is happening at Id.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because the CEO made poor decisions, or misallocated funds get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.
> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?
Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.
> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China
This is literally what has already happened.
The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
I am pointing out that some folk here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, which happen all the time at ununionized organizations.
I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
I hope we can all agree that a slave plantation should not exist in 2025, regardless of whether it's making billions in profit or insolvent.
They're saying you forgot about the range 1:1 to 0:1.
So minimum wage should be enough to be above poverty line.
This would solve cases like walmart employees being in poverty and needing government assistance to live.
Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.
The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.
Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.
> They are the libertarian solution.
They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
So why not improve things in the meantime?
Let's do that then.
> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
most case of ruin come from hostile warfare and/or interventions/state terrorism.
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth.
Could it be because literally lives are cheap.
Annoying.
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