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At noon on July 17, my colleagues and I stepped away from our desks in the video game studio Tender Claws.

Two of our colleagues who work from home walked into the office unannounced; our foreign colleagues participated virtually on a laptop. We handed out a letter and read it aloud together: “Dear Management: We are proud to announce that we are forming the Tender Claws Human Union.”

Two weeks later, we received voluntary recognition, making Tender Claws the fourth certified unionized video game studio in North America. Our company is small, with a unit of only 11 employees, but our victory joins a nationwide wave of organization in games and technology.

Before 2020, there were virtually no unionized workers in these two industries. Today there are more than 3,000 of us only in the Communications Workers (CWA).

Example: On the day we delivered our petition, quality assurance workers at Blizzard Albany launched their own union campaign. This small unit would create a second alliance in gaming giant Activision Blizzard, known for titles like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

PROBLEMS IN PARADISE’

Game workers make our living building video games. We create 2D and 3D art, compose audio, conduct quality assurance testing, encode game functionality, write character dialogue, design game mechanics, perform customer service, and manage game player communities. Our labor has made our industry a financial giant, expected to generate $200 billion this year.

Workers in high-tech jobs are often stereotyped as table tennis elites, but the reality is more complex. Some in our industry earn six figures, but many are paid well below the cost of living in the country’s most expensive cities. And most quality assurance and customer service employees barely make minimum wage.

From Google to Activision Blizzard, our workplaces are split between full-time employees and an underclass of temps, suppliers and contractors. Work-life balance is notoriously bad for both groups due to “crunch”, long overtime hours in the months or years before the launch of new software. And harassment and discrimination are common in workplaces traditionally dominated by straight white men.

We united Tender Claws as a wall-to-wall unit to reduce crunch, negotiate sustainable career development and diversify our hiring process. Tender Claws was founded with the intention of being a forward-thinking workplace, and management has gone to great lengths to act fairly, but we are not immune to the dynamics of the industry. The vision of a better workplace can only be fulfilled if the employees themselves, through our union, have a direct say in the decisions that affect us.

INFORMAL ORGANIZED

The problems in games and technology are not new. Workers have been organizing informally for decades, using salary spreadsheets, class action lawsuits, whisper networks, press releases and, more recently, strikes. Some of these isolated actions have yielded moderate victories, and over time they have developed an awareness of the power of collective action in our industries.

When you work in a zero percent unionized industry, it can be tempting to stay in this realm of informal organizing. A one-off action has a clean beginning and end, and feels less risky than organizing a union. It’s easier to get colleagues to commit to something just once, and you can get away without forming a good leadership structure.

But this cuts both ways. Stand-alone actions are easier because they do not fundamentally challenge the balance of power between employees and management. It’s hard to hold onto the wins. The moment things cool down and managers feel no longer being watched, they can quietly retaliate against troublemakers and restore the status quo.

DROPPING THE YOU WORD

Fellow organizers and I called suggesting unionization “dropping the U-word.” We told ourselves that if an informal action really went well, we could escalate into unions. But that perfect moment never seemed to come.

Last fall, after three years of organizing with volunteer groups, a friend gave me a hard love: “If you call it ‘the U-word’ with me, how could you be ready to say it to a colleague?” This was the kick in the ass I needed.The following week I reached out to colleagues who had taken part in class actions and ripped off the band-aid: “How would you like to form a union?”

Within a week we had a core group of organizers. A few months later we formed an organizing committee. We made mistakes, learned a lot and had many ups and downs. But by June we had 100 percent support in our negotiating unit and by July we had received union recognition.

Sometimes being bold and candid makes all the difference. No one else is going to unite our industries for us.

A MOVEMENT IS BORN

The grassroots organization Game Workers Unite emerged at a trade show in March 2018, protesting a roundtable called “Union Now? Pros, Cons, and Consequences of Unionization for Game Developers.” The moderator, a former CEO and then head of a toothless “game developers” nonprofit, was clearly not neutral, and when more than 100 angry game workers poured into the event, it became clear that she was the only one in the room. who worried about the ‘disadvantages’ of unions.

After the conference, the organizers set up Game Workers Unite departments around the world and put our energy into organizing. By providing training, connecting with established unions and building networks of excited playworkers, we sowed the seeds of future unionization.

In 2020, the CWA joined grassroots networks such as Game Workers Unite, bringing the support of a major union to the North American game and tech industry. They pooled resources and staff organizers as part of their campaign to organize digital workers (CODE-CWA).

This effort bore fruit in December 2021, when workers from indie game studio Vodeo formed the first game workers union in North America. They were followed in 2022 by quality officers at Activision Blizzard subsidiary Raven software.

Outside of video games, the tech industry has had a similar arc. The grassroots Tech Workers Coalition emerged in 2014 and advocated for collective action and unionization in much the same way Game Workers Unite would.

Unions at Kickstarter (OPIEU) and Glitch (CODE-CWA) gained recognition in 2020. And in 2021, employees of Google and other Alphabet subsidiaries formed a “militant minority” union affiliated with CODE-CWA. They recently passed the 1,000 member mark.

FULCRUM INDUSTRY

Game and tech workers are suffering, and that’s reason enough to unite. But there are also strategic benefits to the rest of the labor movement in organizing high-tech workplaces.

Technology has overhauled the working world – think high-tech surveillance in warehouses, digitized offices and schools, and the apps used to create many jobs.

Google Search, Amazon Web Services, and Twitter are so widely used that, despite being privately owned, they begin to resemble public infrastructure. The bosses who control the production of these technologies have more power than most world nations.

For employees, the result of all this technology is that we are less powerful, more isolated and more closely watched. But that is not inevitable. Technology could be liberating if it wasn’t left to a handful of millionaires and billionaires to decide how to use it.

By uniting technology, we can use our collective power to make the world a better place. Imagine if we refused to use our skills to exploit gig workers, target children with in-game purchases, or wage wars.

The first step is for game and tech workers to reject the lie that we are “not like other workers” and join our siblings in the labor movement.

STRIPPERS AND GAMERS

A surprising friendship blossoms between game workers in Southern California and strip club dancers who strike at Star Garden — another group that is “not like other workers.”

Organizers with Game Workers of SoCal have helped produce stripper strike boards and buttons, and we often walk past their picket line. The organizers of the strippers’ strike helped the Tender Claws union organize a T-shirt making party and supported game workers at Activision Blizzard when they resigned in protest against harassment and discrimination based on race and gender.

The contexts are different, but the standout strippers and the workers of Activision Blizzard are fighting for the same vision: safer, fairer workplaces. We have more in common than we think.

Robin LoBuglio (she/her) is a gameplay programmer who is a member of the Tender Claws Human Union Organizing Committee and SoCal Game Workers Steering Committee.