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.”