Bethesda Game Studios workers have formed a new union.
On Twitter, the new union introduced themselves with this statement:
“We, a majority of developers at Bethesda Game Studios Dallas, Rockville, and Austin, are ecstatic to announce the formation of our union with @CWAUnion. Together as #OneBGSUSA, we advocate for the betterment of every developer at BGS, setting the new standard for our industry.”
One BGS USA also expressed their solidarity with other Bethesda unions at Zenimax and One BGS Montreal. Finally, they revealed that they are now working on their first contract with Microsoft.
As reported by The Verge, the CWA says that Microsoft has already recognized the union. It will be the first such union were workers of all eligible job positions will be represented in a Microsoft owned video game studio.
For their part, Microsoft has declined to comment to the press.
Microsoft gained an unlikely ally in the CWA and their parent organization, the AFL-CIO, in the Activision deal. But the CWA and AFL-CIO tried to clarify their position; it was not so much that they were now working for Microsoft, so much as that they saw the existing management at Activision Blizzard King as hostile to their advocacy.
Microsoft already had a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA in 2022 They then made a new deal with the AFL-CIO in terms of labor neutrality and AI last year. As a result of these deals, those CWA union members were protected from the recent slate of layoffs at Microsoft, including but not exclusive to their Xbox gaming division.
So that deal may have seemed to be focused on Activision at the time, but of course, it’s now clear that the CWA were also looking out for workers at Bethesda, and the other game studios owned by Microsoft.
It’s easy to get cynical about this when the CWA was not able to protect Microsoft’s non-unionized workers from layoffs. But this does set a precedent for other game companies to follow. These unions can protect video game developers from the industry’s worst excesses, such as crunch, and toxic work culture.
It seems there is no guarantee that the union can effect these changes. But if unions can step in for video game workers, we won’t need to go through cycles of whistleblower reports leading to outside intervention to stop these things from happening. So it’s important that unions be placed in the position to prove their worth.
