The gaming company Gamechuck has entered the history of Croatian trade union organization by signing the first collective agreement in the IT industry, which has provided many benefits to employees, but also equal salaries for everyone regardless of work experience and position – from the cleaner to the director – as well as other benefits. Co-founder and director Aleksandar Gavrilović claims that they have done what is customary in Western European countries and Scandinavia and that their collective agreement protects the weakest.
The first collective agreement in the gaming industry in Croatia was signed by Gamechuck with the New Union, thereby providing significant benefits to employees. Many employers today offer benefits to employees to find new ones and retain existing ones; is Gamechuck following this path?
– In the gaming industry, there is a large supply in the labor market because it is a new and attractive industry that interests many young people eager to work in it, so the supply of workers is growing faster than the supply of jobs. There is certainly no shortage of juniors eager to learn and enter the industry at Gamechuck or other companies. However, everyone lacks quality seniors, not only because the industry is too young to have many seniors, but also because seniors often decide to start their own companies and work on their games. The collective agreement is, by nature, an instrument that protects the weakest, not seniors, whose negotiating position is already strong enough, but precisely those who usually receive the lowest salaries: illustrators, writers, testers, and so on. Of course, there are significant benefits such as a six-hour workday plus a 45-minute break or profit sharing, but it should be taken into account that our collective agreement, as part of the work systematization, stipulates salary levels, which may deter the most experienced from applying in the labor market. Another problem is that our specific collective agreement and the general policy of our company stipulate identical salaries for all employees, so juniors and seniors, programmers and illustrators, cleaners and directors all have identical salaries, which is why they are sometimes not competitive. For example, in such a distribution, illustrators are paid above the average they could receive in the market, while programmers are below average. Seniority and how to address it, as well as employee retention, are subjects of discussion between workers and management that we are trying to resolve unconventionally to ensure ideals of equality and solidarity, but this is very challenging in the existing market economy with limited resources.
You are one of the company’s co-owners and co-founders, but also a leftist. How much of your influence is there in that ‘socialist’ collective agreement?
– Trade unionism is a completely normal phenomenon in developed capitalist countries like Austria or Scandinavia, and there the coverage of collective agreements is several times higher than in Croatia. Unfortunately, thirty years of media war against the specter of socialism has left an irreparable impression that something that is a civilizational standard in the West and North is here ‘socialism’. This speaks volumes for itself, and if this is a sign of the future, I assume that in another thirty years, when the workweek of sixty or more hours becomes a normal thing, as it already is in most of the IT sector, we will probably consider those who advocate for a healthy balance between work and life to be socialists.
