With an armload of handmade zines and an animated roundtable discussion, the grassroots labor organizers from Game Workers Unite made quite a showing at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Now it appears their work is beginning to pay off.

Earlier this month, a chapter in the United Kingdom officially became a legal trade union in that country. Representatives of Game Workers Unite tell Polygon that they anticipate multiple public efforts to form unions at major studios in the United States and Canada in the coming year.

“By the end of 2019, you’re going to see some public campaigns,” said Emma Kinema, one of the co-founders of Game Workers Unite.

“Stuff might go south and people might have to go [dark] for a little bit,” she continued. “But I would expect by the end of 2019, you’re going to see out-there and public campaigns in the U.S. and Canada.”

North American efforts

Game Workers Unite began as a private conversation among colleagues in March 2018. The effort quickly snowballed into a dedicated Discord server and, later, a full-blown labor organization. According to the mission listed on its website, its goal is to “connect pro-union activists, exploited workers, and allies across disciplines, classes, and countries in the name of building a unionized game industry.”

Prior to the Game Developers Conference there were perhaps 200 members of Game Workers Unite around the world. Now Kinema, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity online, said the organization has grown to more than 800 active members with at least 17 chapters in North America alone. That includes chapters in nearly every major geographical hub for game developers on the continent, with cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, North Carolina, Ottawa, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver all represented.

The influx of new members has come at a time when labor practices in the game industry are under intense scrutiny, following mass layoffs at Telltale Games and accounts of overwork and abuse at Rockstar Games during the production of Red Dead Redemption 2.

When members get together, Kinema said, it’s not just idle talk. Efforts are ongoing inside at least 12 existing studios to form bargaining units and demand the right to negotiate the terms of employment and compensation as a collective. She said that the size of the studios involved run the gamut from several dozen employees all the way up to shops with thousands of workers.

How exactly all this will work, legally and logistically, is being handled on a case by case basis with Game Workers Unite providing guidance and training. Kinema said that several groups are currently working in partnership with Game Workers Unite and an existing labor union. However, the majority of groups are relying solely on Game Workers Unite and independently organizing within various studios and companies. Whether or not these groups will eventually align with larger, established regional and national labor unions is an open question.

“If they want a connection to outside resources like existing unions, we’ll make those connections,” Kinema said. “Otherwise, we’ll just try to provide resources and support and organizer trainings.”

Kinema said that the effort to form unions in North America, and the United States in particular, is complicated by the outsized power which management wields over workers. Part of the calculus of unionization efforts is gaining enough support among coworkers before demanding that management recognize the union. Much of Kinema’s year has been spent seeding the skills needed to form a bargaining unit among individual Game Workers Unite chapters.

“When it comes to providing those workers with resources and training, it’s often a lot of the same skill sets,” Kinema said. “It’s about learning to have one-on-one meetings with people, learning about the issues that are affecting them in the workplace and representing how those can be addressed with collective action. How to organize a bargaining committee, and an organizing committee and things like that, but also how to do things safely and securely under the watch of the employer for as long as possible.”

Determining the right moment to go public with efforts to unionize is key to successful organizing, Kinema said. Announcing the intention too early can give management time to sow fear and mistrust of union leaders or the unionization process itself. Announcing too late can allow management to put in place policies that are anti-worker and hard to overturn.

“Ultimately, where I kind of land on this issue,” Kinema said, “is that, frankly, if you can stay non-public as a union as long as you can and still be making gains in the workplace, that’s super important.”

International efforts

The members of Game Workers Unite that Polygon spoke with all stressed the importance of dealing with working conditions in the game industry. Crunch — the practice of working well beyond 40 hours per week for weeks or months at a time to complete a game project — came up repeatedly in those conversations. But social issues were also a big reason for organizing.

Karn Bianco, the newly-elected chair of Game Workers Unite U.K., said his group formed around three pillars, including the elimination of unpaid overtime and increasing the compensation for quality assurance testers and other contract workers being paid the minimum wage. But he said the membership is also eager to improve diversity and inclusion within the industry.

“It’s a very white and male-dominated industry,” Bianco said. “It can be a very unwelcoming place if you don’t fall into that category, especially if you are public-facing. Looking back at GamerGate and other targeted hate campaigns and harassment, especially on social media, historically we don’t think companies have been brilliant about supporting their employees through those kind of events. We want to be a force that can do that on behalf of workers.”

To that end, Game Workers Unite U.K. has aligned itself with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, an organization that recently made headlines when it won a landmark lawsuit against Uber in 2017.

“The IWGB kind of specializes in quite high-profile campaigns,” Bianco said. “They’ve achieved a lot of against-the-odds wins for these very precarious workers in the so-called gig economy. We’ve had good pay raises and better working conditions in a very short period of time.”

Much like their U.S.-based colleagues, Game Workers Unite U.K. will spend much of 2019 targeting individual shops within Britain’s massive game development industry for unionization efforts. But those efforts can be perilous, as the situation at French game developer Eugen Systems, makers of Steel Division: Normandy 44, proves out.

In March 2018, employees of Eugen went on strike over unpaid wages and what they claim were contractual breaches. The strike lasted seven weeks before workers returned to their desks, but the labor dispute itself remains unresolved. According to Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo, an independent French video game union also known as STJV, the situation has since escalated. At least six workers were fired from the company just before Christmas.

The STJV claims those firings are evidence that management is lashing out at union organizers.

“We believe that this was an act of retaliation,” STJV said in a statement, “and a preemptive move by management ahead of a case over low pay being brought against Eugen Systems by 15 employees as well as the STJV.”

The case is expected to go before a French tribunal in March 2019, one year after the strike began.

Despite the situation in France, Kinema remains optimistic about the path ahead for Game Workers Unite. The goal right now is to support unionization efforts in whatever form they take. Ultimately, she said, it’s up to the workers themselves to be advocates for change.

“I think we’ve got some tipping point stuff going on in the workplace,” Kinema said. “We think there’s some crucial issues that people are finally ready to organize around.”