United Wizards of the Coast(unitedwizardsofthecoast.com) |
United Wizards of the Coast(unitedwizardsofthecoast.com) |
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
“Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes their power, and that can lead to bad practices in the long run.
If you care about fairness, generally, and not just “what’s good for me personally” you don’t have to look hard to see powerful unions acting in bad faith.
This is like asking how people can be anti Google when Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
I personally lean pro-union, but it takes very little empathy to understand that the people who are anti-union don't believe that the unions will serve their stated purpose.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
This alone is enough reason for anyone to be up in arms and unionize. Kudos to them for banding together for better working conditions. I hope more big companies follow suit.
It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
Popularity is not a reliable metric.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
That's because none of these would-be founders know how to turn a profit without exploiting their workers. :)
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
Unions aren't really there for customer service. Nonetheless, there's often times where the worker demand benefit customers too: Nurses fight for better nurse:patient ratios, benefiting patients too; teachers fight for the resources for them to teach well; starbucks baristas fight for a work pace that allows them to actually engage customers like the brand used to offer. etc
The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
What are you planning on doing with this? Where should I follow along?
I assume the wording in this letter is referring to using LLMs to generate slop as creative assets like images and music.
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
At a company like WotC you will get more than 2 weeks of pay worth of severance which is more than the employee equivalent of providing 2 weeks notice. There is also things like WARN in California which require much more than a 2 weeks notice when a doing a layoff.
>Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility.
Except that individual productivity is very often not the bottleneck. The goal should be making the process productive and efficient.
>only enforceable when the media is produced by humans
Hollywood has used AI and other machine produced graphics for special effects for years and that does not prevent the studio from having copyright over the movie.
>stop licking boots
Acknowledging how much value companies bring to both society and investors does not require licking boots or thinking they are a "poor endangered company."
Companies often expect employees to give advance
notice of termination of employment, but employers
do not feel beholden to their employees to
reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
Nobody can force a worker to work, but an employer is often forced to employ someone they'd rather not. Maybe sometimes this makes sense, but it's actually the exact opposite of what you're trying to claim.
Many companies showed improved productivity when
people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary
are often not backed up by actual data outside of
cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial
positions.
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is
protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far
(thankfully), only enforceable when the media
is produced by humans. Protections against the
use of generative AI are not only good for
workers' long-term productivity, but also
for legal purposes
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and
start understanding why any of our society works
today at all.
As a hint, every protection you have
ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement
funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time
off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid
for in blood by someone a company decided was not more
important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability
by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think
it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those
working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random
person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor
endangered company! :("
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
It's their house now, and it's fine.
If not careful, it can come across as elitist: the notion that unions are for people who are replaceable—people that need unions.
I wonder though if those absolutely certain that they thrive in a meritocracy will have second thoughts if/when Corporate decides they're replaceable by AI.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
I would be a lot less shocked if Hasbro sends in the Pinkertons to do some "persuasion" in the coming weeks and months:
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/new...
If you fed all the lore into an LLM and trained diffusion models on all the artwork I bet you could keep the train running from India until the end of time. The only thing that would derail it is if customers _knew_ it wasn't "authentic."
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.
Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.
It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.
There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).
For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.
For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).
https://koncontributes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...
Examples of ruinous two-tiered contracts include UFCW's 1978 contract, Teamsters' 1979 contract, UAW's 1979 contract and their 2007 contract.
But two-tier contracts are the result of employer power. Employers always portray them as an inevitable outcome of the legal form of collective bargaining; the historical record cannot sustain this reading.
The solution to two tier is more powerful unions, which are inherently more democratic unions, because wage workers only have leverage if they act in concert.
I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.
Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant.
The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage
The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."
I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.
Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.
You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.
You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.
If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.
There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.
You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.
Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Google%2CMeta%2CA... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
Further, I posit that existence of such Unions serves as an incentive for voters not to simply assign more pay and benefits to such servants directly. Mayors and Governors know that it's always going to be a "Union game" and all they can do is negotiate - even when they're Progressives who actually want to pay teachers well.
It just gets worse when it's Cops instead of State School teachers.
Big assumption about "interests" lead to bad analysis, in my experience.
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Yes, this is a big part of my critique.
I'm no lawyer and can't provide a useful explanation of the "why", but literally every educator I know is in the Educator's union. Same with Cops and Nurses. I don't know any airline pilots but I understand it's the same way.
Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).
Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.
Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.
Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
In the real world case of long standing Teachers Unions in Australia (they vary by state) it is literally impossible to answer such a question on the basis of such a shallow construct.
The answer is both Yes and No - in any specific case the individual circumstances would be looked at - eg: as laid out Yes, they defend, however in most IRL cases the circumstances on the ground are far more complex, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a bunch of fellow peer union member coworkers to speak up in favour of not defending.
Yea. But if I made a claim that h1b holders were biologically disinclined to not be as capable of doing software, I wouldn’t.
Damore was just a misogynist.
As for what solutions union provide - I have already explained. They exist to protect workers' interests. They do not exist to solve company's problems. That is the job of the company.
You said "It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem," and I am asking, what solutions have unions "made sure" that the companies have done instead of layoffs? I am looking for concrete examples as I often hear this claim but I'm not sure what a union can do if the solution is layoffs, so my question is, what other solutions are there?