video game workers face-off multiple employers at once

In the summer of 2022, Edmonton video game workers made history by becoming the first Canadian video game workers to unionize. Represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) these workers have fought for a fair first contract until September 2023, when they were laid off. 

The laid-off UFCW members were employed by Keywords Studios which provides services and labour to larger game companies. Unionized Keywords workers were working on quality assurance and testing for BioWare which is owned by Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest video game publishers in the world. BioWare ended their contract with Keywords Edmonton in a move that the union called “shocking.” 

Video game workers have long faced challenges of low wages, long hours and a lack of work life balance in Canada. Marie-Josée Legault from Téluq-Université du Québec and Johanna Weststar from the University of Western Ontario wrote in a research paper that video game workers deal with unpredictable hours and have little real control over when they must work. According to a study by the Informations and Communications Technology Council, Ontario employers in the creative technology industry are struggling to retain workers because they cannot pay the salary workers expect. 

While Bioware’s decision to end their contract with Keywords has definitely put unionized workers in a difficult position, UFCW has also expressed frustration with Keywords for their handling of the situation. 

“Instead of trying to pivot the team to other projects and continue to bargain for a fair first agreement, the company laid off the recently unionized staff,” UFCW wrote on their website. 

The video game workers’ struggle against both BioWare and Keywords highlights the difficult bargaining situation that many workers in the video game sector face. 

According to a paper written by Legault and Weststar, collective action for video game workers can be more complicated due to the amount of contract based and agency work. 

In their paper, “Organising challenges in the era of financialisation” Legault and Weststar highlight how large contractors enter agreements with smaller studios, creating distance between employers and workers. Large contractors often set the working conditions and terms for a project. The funders for a project would usually be considered the employer, but may now remotely set the stage, without having to face as many consequences for their labour practices. 

The diminished role of local managers has harmed the willingness to unionize in the video game sector, Legault and Weststar wrote. Their paper highlighted that many video game workers are privy to the strict agreements that managers are bound to and feel as though the real actor behind their working conditions is inaccessible. 

The increasing separation between the funders of a project and the studios who create the work is referred to as “financialisation” by Legault and Weststar. 

“Financialisation breaks the legal employment chain between funders of the process and the subcontractor who has to provide the product according to the contractor’s strictly defined performance standards,” Legault and Weststar wrote.

Difficulties within a subcontractor organization have placed many of the managers on the same footing as other workers. Legault and Weststar shared the results of a survey that showed the desire to unionize was similar between managers and developers.  

Legault and Weststar highlighted that going forward, contractors must be made part of bargaining that unionized game workers engage in. 

As the first union to represent video game workers in Canada, the UFCW could be setting the stage for how workers address these issues. At the time of writing, the union has been calling out both BioWare and Keywords Studios. In their ongoing email campaign, supporters can send a message to CEOs of Keywords Studios, BioWare and EA calling for fairness for their unionized staff.

If UFCW is able to effectively engage both BioWare and Keywords, it could bolster unionization sentiments in a sector that has struggled due to the actor behind labour conditions separating themselves from workers.