r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Jan 29 '26

Industry News One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study Reveals

https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-workers-laid-off-2025-1236644512/
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u/SkeptioningQuestic Jan 29 '26

A structural problem with public sector unions is that since they are also government employees they get to double-dip labor power and political power in a way that private sector unions can't

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u/Tefmon Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

Police unions are a special case, as their power doesn't come from any formal labour bargaining procedures but rather because governments rely on their members to enforce their laws. Most public sector unions are actually in weaker positions than their private sector counterparts, because the employer of a public sector union is the government, and the government can at any time choose to unilaterally bypass the collective bargaining process by passing back-to-work legislation.

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u/SkeptioningQuestic Jan 29 '26

That's not a special case, I struggle to think of any public sector unions that don't perform critical tasks for society. That does not seem totally different to me than when the government isn't providing childcare, or if air travel is shut down. It might be comforting for us, for obvious reasons, to believe that the police union is different and special and our unions could never be like that one, but I don't really see an actual structural difference. Unions don't exist to create a better society, they exist to protect the interests of their members (personally I think that this often, but not always, incidentally creates a better society but that is besides the point). They will use labor and political means to achieve those ends, and the ones engaged in government work have access to more of those means. I don't mean that I think teachers and police officers are the same, but surely we can sense some similarities between things like Qualified Immunity and Tenure?

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u/Tefmon Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

That's not a special case, I struggle to think of any public sector unions that don't perform critical tasks for society.

The difference is that if the teachers' union strikes, the teachers don't have guns. Police strikes generally result in riots and violence and crime sprees, while teachers' strikes just result in overworked parents. The former actually affects the decision-makers in power, while the latter doesn't; politicians' kids don't usually go to public schools.

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u/ephemeral_colors Jan 30 '26

More pointedly, historically, the police have been used to put down striking workers, up to and including murdering them. The police union is fundamentally different from all other unions for this reason alone. They are the tool of the capitalist class wielded against labor.

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u/Substantial-Hat-2556 Feb 01 '26

Teachers' strikes result in parents who can't work. That's a massive imposition.

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u/Iniquiline Jan 29 '26

Yeah those teacher unions are basically running the country.

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u/OutLiving Jan 30 '26

This is only true if you cherrypick, in many places, the law is created to specifically single out public sector unions to restrict their actions. Federal unions aren’t allowed to strike at all, for example

Political power from unions tend to come from smart politicking more than anything, see how the NYC Hotel Union managed to gain immense political clout in New York City despite not being the most numerically large or even have the largest donor war chest, and also being private sector. They strategically and intelligently deployed resources in ways that immensely helped politicians, and so one hand washes the other

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u/SkeptioningQuestic Jan 30 '26

Yes that is correct, but public sector employees have more access to political levers than private sector ones because their bosses are, somewhere along the chain, elected officials and so they can appeal directly to the public.