Labor Unions and The Problem of "more"

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I am in a very young industry and I have directly been able to watch the formation of unions and what lead to this.
I am a 3D artist (doing more development work right now, but I am still a 3D artist). This industry is really only about 2 decades old and I have been part of it from the start.
Being a 3D artist requires a good education, quite a bit of intelligence, talent and much more. It used to be a really well paid position, but wages have gone down lately.

So what happened:
It got really popular to do this line of work and so a lot of people started doing it. There also was and still is a very high demand for this line of work as well.
That is not the problem though. This industry did not have a union and so people were abused, really badly. There were accounts of artists working at Electronic Arts (the largest and richest game developer in the entire world at the time) that had to work long overhours night shifts and much more during crunch times that were never compensated in any way.
The account of the wife of one such artist on a public blog shook the industry.
There were reports of artists being promised bonuses after a game ships, so they would work overhours for free, only for them to be fired right after the game went goldmaster.
Artists were fired right before a game went gold, or a movie was released and their legitimate place in the credits was denied to them.
The demands on the visual effects departments have been going up, up, up. The salaries have been going down. Entire visual effects businesses went out of business because of the situation.
The unfair part is that the salaries for actors that ARE organized in unions have been going up at the same time. One has to understand though that compared to the actors, the visual effects have been contributing more and more to movies and TV- shows. One might even want to claim that visual effects have made the jobs of everybody else easier. We can fix everything, bad direction, bad acting, etc.
Many badly written movies were watched simply because of the promise of visually stunning effects.
Despite the 3D and visual effects artists not having a union, their jobs have been going overseas as well. Artists were sometimes even forced to go work overseas and build the departments that would ultimately cost them and others their jobs.
Within an environment like this, it is natural for a counter- movement to develop. It is only natural for those that have been ripped off and mangled by the system to organize themselves.
Are you really surprised by that?!
It is still a slow process and even among the artists people are not sure about whether they want it or not. What everyone is agreeing on is that the current situation has become unbearable. So something will happen, or the entire industry will crumble, the quality of work will suffer from that too. Though some CEOs obviously care more about a couple of extra cents saved than the quality of the work. This is quite visible in the car industry, actually. Cheap work from China and India does save a couple of cents per car, but it will backfire at some point...
Well its all good as long as some CEO gets an extra fat bonus for that, I guess. He wont be in office anymore when the whole thing starts breaking apart.
My point being: You push to hard into one direction, you will generate a force in the oposite direction. You push your employees to hard, they will organize themselves and push back. It is the nature of things.

Do you have an online portfolio?

[rjaypeters]

What business is it of yours what money someone else makes as long as they aren't doing anything illegal?

This question reminds me of when I was a wet-behind-the-ears ROTC cadet at Field Training at Tyndall AFB (in Florida). One of the functions of Field Training is to get the mostly-civilian college students slightly familiar with the functions of a real USAF base. We received briefings on a few of the functions of a base: aeromedical operations, fuels management, etc.

At all of our briefings, one of my flight-mates, Priam*, asked the same question of our briefers**: "How much do you make?"

I remember one briefing rapper out a response something like: 'I get paid what every E-5 makes, which is published for everyone to see.' I can't remember if Priam was abashed by this response, but he probably wasn't.

So why is pay, outside of government service, such a carefully guarded secret? I wouldn't expect companies to publicly publish their employee's pay, but maybe within the company? What would be the harm?

*Name changed to protect the guilty.
** Mostly mid-grade Non-Commissioned Officers.