Sega of America officially has its first union.
As reported by GamesIndustry.Biz, Sega and the Communication Workers of America (CWA) have agreed to terms of their labor union contract. Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega (AEGIS), the Sega union that organized under the CWA, and came in the news in the past few months, has ratified their collective bargaining contract.
In other words, Sega has finally recognized this union, and so they will abide by the terms of that contract when it comes to their workers. It’s been a hard struggle for AEGIS, as they organized and formally announced their formation all the way back in July.
Last November, we reported the CWA’s claims that Sega was threatening their employees with layoffs, suggesting that the layoffs were because of their union action. In January of this year, Sega did go ahead with laying off 61 employees. However, the CWA revealed that they were able to save jobs, and win severance for temp workers. That was surely a sign to Sega that this call for a union in their company was simply not going to go away.
As AEGIS points out, this is the first developer union contract in the US video game industry. Because of the CWA’s involvement, they were able to win a lot of concessions from Sega.
Those concessions include:
- Base pay raises for every employee in the unit
- Just cause protections against arbitrary discipline and discharge
- Layoff protections, including severance
- Crediting commitment to all staffers who worked on a game, including early QA testers
- Various codified benefits around an annual bonus plan, retirement plans, health insurance, and more
- A commitment by management to ensure advanced notice of any planned use of AI in the workplace
As the CWA was also involved in helping the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, it is now clear that the CWA will be a part of the video game industry moving forward. As we can see from both news articles, the CWA cannot stop video game industry layoffs from happening completely. But they can affect that process, by limiting those layoffs from happening to their members, and by helping temporary employees get severance.
It isn’t clear for now if other video game companies will see their employees form unions. Ironically, those unions may turn out to fix the many ongoing issues with video game development. If we accept the prevailing ideas that making video games is unsustainable, because the companies are expecting too much money, and overworking their developers, unions are long overdue. Labor restrictions will force game companies and investors to reassess their projects, make reasonable goals and project limitations.
As it exists now, the video game industry makes more money than movies and the music industry. If this industry is to become a sustainable one, however, it needs to pin down all these things that will make it possible for developers to make video games for their entire careers.
