Last week saw the formations of wall-to-wall unions within Blizzard and ZeniMax, which represent some of the biggest moves in the game industry’s current unionization drive.
On the newest Game Developer Podcast episode, Bethesda’s Autumn Mitchell touched on several benefits won by union negotiators during discussions with Microsoft. One such benefit is “recall rights,” wherein companies are required to offer to bring back employees they laid off if they need to refill their role two or three years after they’re dismissed from the company.
Mitchell explained that she’d seen these terms in other tech industry contracts, and their inclusion is a boon for employees and employer alike. “We’re talking about eliminating that ‘revolving door’ at least to some degree,” she said, alluding to the fact that high turnover obliterates institutional knowledge.
In other words, the industry’s swaths of layoffs could potentially be alleviated by studios having a fast method to re-hire new talent after their finances are stabilized.
Fellow Bethesda developer Chris Lusco highlighted other unionization gains, such as converting some freelancers to full-time, and paid holidays and pay bumps for contractors.
If developers are concerned their employer is about to reduce benefits or implement unpopular policies, racing to unionization can be a tool to slow them down. Per Mitchell, union recognition immediately guarantees the “status quo” condition. Under it, changes to current work policies have to be bargained for first, which is particularly helpful for things such as a return-to-office mandate.
When the QA-focused ZeniMax Workers Union was recognized last year, some staff were working from home—and were able to keep doing so even after the company began rolling out return-to-office policies. They’ll be able to keep doing so “until we reach an agreement at the bargaining table” with regard to updated remote work policies, said Mitchell.
The importance of Xbox’s first-party unions
Unionizing isn’t an easy endeavor. While some have been allegedly impeded by their studios’ parent companies, some may naturally fall apart.
Per Lusco, getting Bethesda to this point was “pretty hard.” As an organizer and then-contractor, staying positive during the process was important. Equally key was getting union-ready before layoffs could occur in the immediate aftermath of a project wrapping.
“Giving ourselves a deadline was really big, and we could use that when talking with other people and getting them interested,” he said. “We could tell them, ‘this is scary, but it might work for us.'”
The risk has yielded plenty of rewards for the ZWU: in the year since recognition, it’s secured conditions for AI usage at work shortly after Microsoft announced plans to incorporate the technology into Xbox game development.
The ZWU and a labor neutrality agreement between Microsoft and CWA spurred Bethesda’s Montreal team to make a union of its own. With hundreds of unionized developers, Xbox is helping normalize the practice amongst triple-A studios and console makers specifically.
Mitchell, Lusco, and CWA organizer Emma Kinema discuss further pros to unionizing in this week’s Game Developer Podcast, which you can listen to here.