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Unionization efforts are shaking up the gaming industry
Dec 9, 2022

Unionization efforts are shaking up the gaming industry

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While the labor movement is still small, it is growing in both independent and big gaming companies.

Unions have come to the video game industry. They started small at just one independent developer about a year ago, then those efforts started to spread.

Workers at some of the biggest names in the business have started organizing — at Activision Blizzard and recently at ZeniMax, a company owned by Microsoft.

This sudden upswell is shaking up an industry that has long been known for grueling hours, low pay and a workforce that is not especially diverse. So how did the union movement go from 0 to 60, and where is it headed from here?

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nicole Carpenter, a senior reporter for Polygon, a gaming and entertainment news site. She recently wrote an explainer about unions in the industry.

She said a turning point came in 2021 when California sued Activision for an alleged pattern of sexual harassment and discrimination, which set off a chain of investigations and lawsuits that brought the problems of the industry into the public eye.

Nicole Carpenter: The momentum has been building for the past couple of years. There has always been organizing in the video game industry, but the first unions that we’ve seen started in late 2021. And I think the things that kicked off this sort of effort was bringing to light some of the problems in the industry, stuff like overworking, sexual harassment and other kinds of workplace mismanagement. We saw that in particular with the Activision Blizzard lawsuit with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

Meghan McCarty Carino: This was a lawsuit that was a gender discrimination lawsuit, which mainly sort of brought into the public eye many of the kinds of problems that have been seen as endemic in the video game industry for a long time, right?

Nicole Carpenter (Courtesy Carpenter and Vox Media)

Carpenter: Yeah, even preceding the Activision Blizzard lawsuit, there was another big story when Kotaku, a video game publication, published a story on Riot Games, which makes League of Legends. And that story really was huge, because it brought to light this endemic culture of sexism at the company. And, you know, this has been going on even before that, as well. A lot of these stories go back, you know, decades.

McCarty Carino: So what sort of jobs are we talking about here? What jobs are workers trying to unionize in this industry?

Carpenter: So we’re seeing two different kinds of union efforts. One of them is with smaller independent studios. Most roles there in the indie spaces are included there. But in the major video game studios, we’re seeing quality assurance testers that are leading the charge there. So these people are playing early versions of the games, you know, through all the development cycle. They’re trying to find out what’s going wrong, what players could be doing and seeing if that, you know, causes any problems with the games. And then they’re reporting those issues to developers who are going to fix those issues. And in some cases, they’re fixing them themselves. QA workers, from the folks that I’ve talked to, have said that they feel undervalued in this work. They historically have been a job that is underpaid and is subject to that intense work environment. And they have to work really long hours to find all these issues.

McCarty Carino: Tell me more about some of the sort of distinct issues in the video game industry for these workers, you know, in terms of kind of the culture and the workflow and the practices in this industry that have left many workers feeling frustrated.

Carpenter: One of the big problems is a concept called crunch. And that’s where workers are in the lead-up to a video games release date are working overtime, more than five days a week. They are working extremely long hours and under really intense pressure. And so that’s been a problem for a long time. And that comes up a lot in these unionization talks too. But one thing I’ve heard over the past year is that work from home was really a benefit that workers in the video game industry liked. They were saving money from the commute, they were saving time, and they want to keep that. So when companies started mandating that people come back to the office, that’s kind of what has sparked some of these union efforts that we’re seeing as well.

McCarty Carino: A number of these union efforts involve companies that are now owned or which could be owned by Microsoft. Microsoft signed something called a labor neutrality agreement with the [Communications Workers of America], the communication workers union that’s been organizing here. What does that neutrality agreement mean?

Carpenter: Basically, it means that Microsoft has pledged to not interfere with the unionization process. So they’re not going to do anything that could deter folks from, you know, joining or learning about a union. The company under Microsoft, which is ZeniMax, announced their union run earlier this week, they are voting right now. But they’re not voting in a National Labor Relations Board election. They are voting in a streamlined way provided by CWA and Microsoft, so they will eventually go through the NLRB process, but they aren’t doing that now. And that kind of removes some of the processes that take a long time, some of the legal stuff that takes a long time. And you know, they’re getting straight to the voting.

McCarty Carino: As we head into the new year, what are you going to be watching for in this space?

Carpenter: Yeah, well, so after the announcement of the ZeniMax union, I think that that’s going to be a huge momentum builder for the industry. If the vote goes in the union’s favor, it will be the biggest union we’ve seen so far in the video game industry. They say the proposed group would be about 300 people. The number of unions in the industry right now is small. It’s a fraction of the industry, fraction of a fraction. But, you know, if you look back to two years ago, there were none. So it is a huge leap, and I see that can continuing to grow, especially after seeing the ZeniMax union efforts. I think it’ll make people think, you know, “Hey, maybe we could do that too.”

The gaming news website Kotaku has more details about how Microsoft is responding to union efforts. The company signed a formal labor neutrality agreement with the Communication Workers of America, the union organizing gaming workers.

That means it won’t step in to try to dissuade organizing like some other employers have, like Activision, Amazon, Apple and Starbucks.

Microsoft’s softer approach could be related to it’s nearly $69 billion acquisition proposal for Activision Blizzard, which is now under fire from the Biden administration.

The Federal Trade Commission announced a lawsuit to attempt to block the acquisition on Thursday. Regulators said the deal would allow Microsoft to suppress competition.

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