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by sbarre7 hours ago |
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upvoteby ThrowawayR23 hours ago|
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Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.
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upvoteby awongh2 hours ago|
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One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it.

That is just not the case with acting, where the end product being differentiable is part of the inherent value of the product.

Also, it's probably true that SAG's loss of industry power has very much to do with the loss of the power of movie stars in general.

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upvoteby shimman3 hours ago|
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Don't really see anyone doing this, more like the pro-union arguments I see on HN are mostly about getting paid for on-call, wanting a worker elected member to the board, and having leadership actually held accountable for their decisions.

Getting paid for being on-call seems straight forward to me.

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upvoteby awongh6 hours ago|
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This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind.

In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end.

Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.

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upvoteby raw_anon_11116 hours ago|
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How will unions help stand up to streamers? Many of the “Netflix originals” are already just co financed or licensed foreign films and many others are filmed in Canada.

People always think unions are magic when I saw in my small town where I grew up in South GA was that when union demands got to onerous - factories just picked up and left.

Just like software engineers scream unionization when tech companies can just expand departments overseas and as a bonus, they don’t have to worry about H1B shifting policies

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