Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in- Marketplace
Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in
Well, historically speaking that's pretty much reversed -- requiring membership to benefit from a union goes all the way back to the origin of unions, because the purpose of unions is to benefit the union members, and while ideally union dues are entirely spent on services for the union members, a certain amount of skimming also goes back to the origins of unions (though there's a line drawing question; people who are doing extra work on behalf of the union deserve fair compensation for their effort, so at what point does this cross the line into profiteering?) Non-profits that support non-members are more properly understood as lobbying groups and/or charities.
I'd love to add more to that particular discussion with details about how unions also often improved conditions for non-members, but I think getting bogged down into the intricacies of unions and their history in the US would probably stray a bit too far from the D&D-centric nature of this forum.
I agree with the earlier sentiment that a widespread, organized drive by consumers to support the unionization effort would be more effective than one or two folks posting here. Which isn't to say "don't bother" or anything of the sort. Just... manage your expectations. And if you really want to be heard, get together with some friends (or make some new ones) who feel similarly and organize an email campaign. As for me personally, I've never felt super comfortable boycotting to support a union unless they specifically ask for it. Tanking sales to support people whose jobs depend on those sales feels... iffy. But hey, I'm not a labor or economics expert or anything, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.
Regardless, I think the folks who work on MTG and D&D are amazingly talented and hard working and they deserve all the support.
You are misinformed. Not all unions in the US follow the model of Hollywood trade guilds like SAG-AFTRA. That's simply not factual.
Also, people who are not a member of a union frequently benefit from them -- for example, if a shop has both union and non-union members, the minimum pay rate established by the union contract will quite often by enjoyed by non-members as well.
In the US, damn near every right we have as citizens in the realm of employment law are the result of unions shedding sweat and very literal blood.
The purpose of a union is to benefit the members. This doesn't mean it doesn't benefit non-members, it frequently does, but that's a happy accident, not a design goal.
SAG-AFTRA doesn't benefit non-union talent.
Need I bring up Hazbin Hotel's transition from YouTube pilot to Amazon series? How much fresh & new yet not able to afford SAG-AFTRA fees talent got shafted in favor of union actors in that process?
But yeah, before the 80s, US unions had a shitton more stability & power. Then Ronald Reagan deregulated EVERYTHING.
I don't think Hasbro will let WotC recongnize any union, especially because Delaware(Where Hasbro is incorporated) feels like the kind of place where nasty Reagan-era "right-to-work" laws effectively ban such.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
When a non-SAG voice actor gets session length protections for vocally stressful material, or has a two-hour minimum recording time-block for payment, why do you think that is? The goodness of clients' hearts?
Unions set baseline standards for industries.
US unions are corrupt to the core.
I have been in a few union shops and have even been an active paying member of a BIG one.
I walked into work one day and was told to vote for our national president. My voting card was already filled out with "my" chosen candidate and it just needed my signature. It was explained to me by several large members of the union that simply not voting would be "problematic".
As I learned later this was just how things were done and members of several other unions told me the very same story about their unions.
Teamsters, United auto workers, Steel workers union, roofers union. All mob run until around the Ron Regan era. Oh do I have stories. Even the people who worked in our local news ,TV and print, confirmed it. Even their unions told them to print the "correct" story,or there would be trouble for everyone. And i witnessed it. A local news team cut off and interview as soon as the picketing union members started to throw rocks and even a firebomb at a managers car. They did not want to make the story about the firebomb because it would mean trouble for them.
No photo evidence means it didn't happen. But as soon as cheap digital cameras and cell phones came about they couldn't hide the evidence anymore.
Way to quote anti-union propaganda right outta Reagan.
Which is recycled from anti-New Deal propaganda.
Also, no photo evidence goes both ways. You have none, either.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
And if that's going to be the standard of proof for this thread, then I suspect no one will be able to prove anything topical.
I'd argue talking points recycled from mandatory anti-union meetings some employers force their employees to attend aren't particularly topical to discussing the efficacy of a single-person boycott of D&D Beyond to support the MTGA union.
The history of unions and the labor movement in the US, their victories, their shortcomings, their real controversies versus the controversies driven solely by anti-union propaganda, and their decline in influence as victims of their own success much like vaccines is a very big, very deep, very fascinating discussion. But it's also wildly off-topic for the D&D Beyond forums. I mean, I suppose someone might want to talk about those things in terms of creating a world with its own history, society, and conflicts inspired by those things, and that could be an interesting discussion, but basing a campaign too closely on real-world topics that people get heated about gets problematic real quick.
For whatever it's worth, I fully support this.
Supporting a product, when you know the people who are making it are being mistreated by the employer, is the equivalent of supporting mistreatment. If Wizards of the Coast employees are pushing back against their employer this publicly, things are probably a lot worse over there than anyone even knows. Employee rights in the US are a joke as it is, most people are less employees and more indentured servants. The US has fallen so far behind when it comes to basic rights, I'm not sure it even qualifies as a free country anymore, and the root cause isn't the government so much as it is the fact that the government is controlled by corporation who are getting away with anything they can afford to get away with. Hopefully, we see more of this type of social change.