I'd imagine the fear is they get crushed, replaced with the cheapest option available located in a place with even less rights. And everyone moves on with the narrative and another move towards labor rights dies with a whimper
> replaced with the cheapest option available located in a place with even less rights
Cheapest is not equal to less rights. Compared to US most developed countries are cheaper, but with more labor rights. So it would make sense to outsource it to, say, CEE EU countries.
If you outsource to anywhere, including within your own country, you've always got a game of telephone going on.
If you outsource to anywhere with a different language (which, from the US PoV kinda includes much of Europe, but less than you might expect from the national languages), what's lost in translation is comparable to the impact of machine natural language processing — so you get the same quality from ChatGPT etc., which is cool, but not quite good enough. (And when LLMs become that good, it will make a lot of people very sad).
If you outsource to poor countries, you also have to worry about the stability of the power grid and telecoms impacting your ability to communicate with the reliability you expect in corporate circles.
Fear of leaks, dealing with timezone differences that slow down the work, cultural differences leading to misunderstandings, or generally requiring more iterations to get the same result. Sure it might be cheaper even if it takes 10x as long, but games have tight roadmaps and hard deadlines so in some cases time may matter more than money.
At least in the software business, the cheaper options than eastern Europe usually have such broad cultural differences that the management overhead doesn't offset the cheaper cost.
A unionized work force might cost more and tip the balance the the other way, for better or for worse. But mostly the problem here is probably retaliation.
Either way, some work conditions are so bad that it is a risk work to taking over a status quo that harms workers in a way they can’t stay in the industry very long regardless. QA are certainly treated the worst in an industry that already has poor work conditions while representing more $$$ than the movie industry.
