The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is launching an industry-wide union of video game workers in North America and Canada, which it says will help “build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status”.
The CWA has been at the centre of many of the successful US games industry unionisation efforts over the last few years, with 2024 seeing announcements of unions at the likes of Bethesda Game Studios and Blizzard. Its newly unveiled United Videogame Workers (UVW-CWA) operates a little differently to a traditional certified union, however, serving as a direct-join industry-wide organisation – said to be the first of its kind for the games industry in the US.
The nature of the UVW-CWA means any freelance or full-time video game industry worker – artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, and beyond – can join if they’re based in the US or Canada, with dues calculated on a sliding scale. And it’s also open to industry musicians, having been launched in partnership with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). This, the CWA says, will help “build power across the industry without the obstacles and delays that employers can impose during the traditional union certification process”.
“Our mission is to take back our lives, our labour, and our passion from those who treat us like replaceable cogs,” the UVW-CWA writes. “To empower our fellow workers; to link up arms with the laid off, with the freelancer, with the disillusioned contractor, with the disenfranchised and the marginalized, with the workers labouring invisibly to keep this industry afloat. Our goal is to create a union… to fight the whims of CEOs and private equity vultures.”
“We are going to draft a video game worker bill of rights,” the UVW-CWA explains elsewhere, “setting standards that have been glaringly absent from our craft for too long. It will address inequality in hiring, the pervasive reliance on crunch, healthcare for contractors, and protections against all manner of injustice. Armed with this bill, new organisers can activate with clarity of goal and action, cultivated by the shared knowledge of not only fellow game developers, but workers in the entire labour movement.”
In an accompanying FAQ, the UVW-CWA continues, “Not only do we build community and solidarity amongst video game workers, we also strive to build large-scale education campaigns about labour organising in the video game industry, provide legal support and layoff support funds for disenfranchised workers, write template contract standards, build professional development and mentorship programmes within our community, and so much more.” The first of the UVW-CWA’s campaigns will focus on layoffs, and a petition is being shared at this week’s GDC in the hope of gaining “widespread support”.
The CWA’s announcement comes amid a devastating few years for the games industry, marked by extensive layoffs and studio closures. Over 25000 employees are believed to have lost their jobs since the start of 2023 – and according to GDC’s most recent State of the Games Industry survey from earlier this year, one in 10 respondents reported being laid off in 2024.