Today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Communications Workers of America (CWA) – the union that represents over 2,000 workers across companies like Microsoft, Activision, Bethesda, and Zenimax – is announcing a new industry-wide union called United Videogame Workers-CWA. Unlike unions that have been studio- or discipline-specific, this one is open to all video game workers in the United States and Canada, regardless of employment status.
UVW-CWA is rooted in the tradition of direct-join unionism, which means the union itself isn’t certified by any particular government or company, allowing anyone to join. As a result, this type of union doesn’t have the same type of legal leverage that something organized in accordance with modern laws and strictures might. But, as Emma Kinema, one of the original game devs behind the 2018 Game Workers Unite campaign and current CODE-CWA senior campaign lead, wrote in a zine explaining the rationale behind UVW-CWA, the law isn’t exactly on workers’ side these days.
"With the tumultuous start of the second Trump Administration, two of the agencies that workers rely on to protect their rights and hold corporations accountable – the Department of Labor (DOL) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – are under attack,” she wrote. “Between Trump’s illegal firing of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, Elon Musk challenging the National Labor Relations Act as unconstitutional, and huge tech giants like Amazon already using the vacant NLRB as grounds to reject union wins, it’s clear that Trump and the billionaire class he represents are working day and night to dismantle labor laws and put even more power back in the hands of corporations. We can no longer expect to rely on traditional legal frameworks to build worker power and to improve workplace conditions.”
If the right-wing, reactionary government that we increasingly have wants to start stripping away that process, they're going to quickly remember that, actually, the NLRB and NLRA are a peace treaty between workers and bosses.
In an interview with Aftermath, Kinema added that many of history’s most notable labor victories were won outside of a standard legal framework.
"For two-thirds of modern industrial history, there were no legal forms of unions,” she said. “They were just humans coming together to organize as best as they could in leverage against their employers for better conditions. Only once you arrive at the 1935 National Labor Relations Act do you get private section union frameworks where you can get certified, have majority collective bargaining rights, etc. And if the right-wing, reactionary government that we increasingly have wants to start stripping away that process, they're going to quickly remember that, actually, the NLRB and NLRA are a peace treaty between workers and bosses; the legal framework for unionism that people have gotten used to over the past 80 years is a peace treaty, and it cuts both ways.”
UVW-CWA also takes aim at another pressing issue currently facing the video game industry: layoffs. The union is kicking off a campaign at GDC with a petition about layoffs it plans to pass around, but more broadly, this new structure provides a means by which designers, programmers, artists, QA testers, and every other discipline under the sun can join the movement even if they’re not currently employed.
"One of the nice things about a direct-join model is, the company doesn't get to define or say who is in the union. The government doesn't have a say in who's in the union,” Kinema said. “So we can define the union as broadly as we want, and for us we're saying it's all workers. Whether you're a direct-hire employee at a major company, you're at an indie studio, you're a freelancer or contractor, or you're unemployed, it doesn't matter. If you're in and of the industry, you belong in the union. You deserve to have a voice in the movement."
Kinema pointed to the history of the United Auto Workers – now one of the most influential unions in the country – which began outside the bounds of formal unionization and bargaining rights.
"A lot of people look to the '30s and '40s as the heyday, the golden era of labor organizing in the United States, right? You get the GM/Flint sit-down strikes of '37 and the steel strikes – all sorts of different things," she said. "People take away valuable lessons, but the wrong lessons in some ways, like 'Oh, you need to map out social leaders' and 'You need to do this and that kind of recruitment' and 'These are the kinds of conversations [the Congress of Industrial Organizations] had.' But they were also organizing a direct-join model, where if someone wanted to support the campaign, if they wanted to be in the union, they would just join. They would become a member, they would get trained up, they would have leadership. They would have actions and things, skirmishes with the companies. It's a more powerful, flexible, and accessible model of organizing."
If you're in and of the industry, you belong in the union. You deserve to have a voice in the movement.
That’s more or less what UVW-CWA is hoping to accomplish with the video game industry, in which a majority of workers approve of unions, but only a small minority are able to participate in them. Make no mistake, though, this is not just a loosely affiliated conglomerate of workers; it is a union with dues and all the rest.
"There are dues,” Kinema said. “$15 USD is the minimum, and then it ranges to one percent income, depending on how you define it. It's all honor system, of course, and it's self-deducted, self-raised. It's not through payroll or anything like that, like a typical union campaign would be. The idea is, we can build leverage and power together by building our resources, by building community, by building a new cadre of organizers in the industry with new experience based off the last several years of organizing."
This approach takes inspiration from preexisting unions in other countries, like IWGB Game Workers Union, the largest union for game devs in the UK at over 1,500 members, which also relies on direct-join unionism. Austin Kelmore, IWGB Game Workers co-founder and chair of the branch, told Aftermath that direct-join unionism allowed the union to reach its current size in just a couple years, but there are potential downsides – such as members expecting a service during times of tumult.
"[Workers] join the union and think they've done what they need to do to improve the industry, and the union will support them if anything comes up," said Kelmore. "This service model for trade unions is easy to fall into and is one of the reasons why unions have lost so much power in the previous decades. ... It's impossible to support an entire industry's workers with staff hired with the small amounts of membership dues we collect. So the challenge, then, is to talk with workers and let them know the power of a union comes from the workers, not the staff. We prefer an organizing model where the workers build power together and push for change themselves. So far, many of our members have been receptive to that message, which fills me with excitement at what we can accomplish together."
Despite all the talk of sticking it to elected officials and bosses – and the unholy hybrid of the two that Trump and Musk’s intertwining serpent tongues represent – Kinema believes that this new approach is plenty compatible with the trail workers and CWA have blazed at companies like Microsoft.
"By no means do we think the direct-join model and the certification model are mutually exclusive to each other. We think they can complement each other, actually, and expand upon each other,” Kinema said. “Part of it is going to be welcoming this new influx of people into the movement through this direct-join model and then giving them the training and education and onboarding such that they can still turn around and do meaningful organizing that doesn't put them at risk in an unnecessary way."
To be attacked by the enemy is to be respected by the enemy.
It’s a big moment for CWA, both in terms of potential growth and possible consequences. While Kinema acknowledged that the government could simply declare membership in UVW-CWA illegal, she believes that's unlikely. However, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has repeatedly rattled his saber in CWA’s direction, going so far as to accuse the union of masterminding Blizzard’s 2021 legal woes in an effort to juice membership during a recent podcast.
Kinema finds that perversely encouraging.
“To be attacked by the enemy is to be respected by the enemy,” she said. "When the boss starts to get scared, when they get nervous, when they start putting out statements, when they start putting out lies, when they start putting pressure on, that's a sign that you're doing something right. That's a sign that you're moving the needle. You're changing the industry for real. I think it's in the psyche of a lot of bosses now that the 'threat' of unionization is on the horizon for them if they don't tread lightly, if they don't treat their workers with care.”
