This article was originally published on October 10, 2025 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

It's now been six months since the formation of United Videogame Workers, in partnership with Communication Workers of America (UVW-CWA). The industry's first direct-join union represents workers across the US and Canada regardless of employment status, including contractors and freelancers. And although it's a new movement in games, response from the industry has been strong.

"There has been such a big influx of new members and folks getting involved in volunteering for different working groups and committees since launch at GDC," CWA's senior campaign lead Emma Kinema tells Knowledge. "And right now, we're over 500 members in United Videogame Workers. There's been a real boost in engagement."

Being an active agent of change

UVW-CWA has been working on a range of projects, from its Videogame Worker Bill of Rights to its We're Done Playing petition about layoffs, demanding "dignity and job security for all". There's also a wealth of work around education, internal structure, incubating workplace campaigns and more, Kinema says.

"It's very typical: with a new campaign, there is often a lot of orientation work to be done, because a lot of folks – especially in games – don't have prior experience with organising. So we need to build a common foundation and a shared language. What does it mean to organise? To fight to improve conditions for ourselves and our peers?

"Very few things in our society encourage people to be active agents of change. We are often encouraged to sit back and watch other people do things, and just embrace the status quo. So in that way it takes a fair bit to get people engaged, but it's some of the most rich and rewarding aspects of the work at the same time."

She continues: "In games, the biggest obstacles to organising are not really the employers. It's not some giant union-busting campaign that's making it really hard, nor is it necessarily a question of capacity and resources going into new organising. The biggest obstacle in all organising is always on the education front. A lot of people have misunderstandings and myths about unions that they pick up from school, from peers, from the media. Unravelling some of these misconceptions is quite a lot of work to do."

Despite these challenges, Kinema says there's been a huge boom in union-organising in games, and more broadly in tech.

"We've got thousands of game workers represented through CWA and building their unions at their specific workplaces through CWA," she says.

The Videogame Worker Bill of Rights

With the very first Videogame Worker Bill of Rights, UVW-CWA wants to "assert and protect" the wellbeing of game workers across the board with a foundational, referential text.

"Now that we've got a pretty strong foundation, we feel like it's time to not just talk about improving things at specific workplaces, but think holistically across the whole industry," Kinema explains.

"What are the types of protections, standards, practices that will benefit the broad majority of game workers? We recently had a big town hall meeting where both CWA union members and game workers from across the industry came out to share their experiences, and articulate the kind of rights they would like to see in the workplace. We're going to draw out the most essential pieces and try to articulate it in a clear way that can be pointed to as a long term vision for our industry. Through union organising, we hope to get to those rights and protections across the board.

"Will it happen tomorrow? Of course not. Will it happen even within the next year? Absolutely not. Organising is a continual process. It will take many workers engaged in struggle across a fair chunk of time, but we know that our best chance to have that shared vision is going to be through organising. That is our best tool as the most effective and historically proven way to build, expand and protect ourselves as workers."

Weathering the storm

The discussion turns to the industry's current challenges and how workers can best face them, with Kinema noting that we both "are and aren't facing unprecedented times."

"I don't want to undermine or deemphasise just how shitty things are for my peers in our industry. Things are rough. There's mass layoffs all over the place. There are corporate buyouts of companies, derailing them from the original vision of their work. When possible, bosses try to get away with stripping pay, stripping conditions, stripping benefits. And they will get away with it if we're not well organised. We need to understand that if we're going to fix and improve our industry, we have to build that community that comes with building a union. To me, that is the biggest way to weather our storm.

"But our industry has seen booms and busts before. We can even think back to the cliché

of when games took a nosedive around the time of that E.T. game coming out, right? We have weathered it before. Were people hurt, were people's lives derailed by that? A hundred per cent. Were some of those things avoidable? Absolutely. But the answer is to organise. The antidote is enforcing the fact that we deserve rights and protections, and even if a layoff is truly necessary, let's have better severance, longer warning times. Things like this can be really powerful protections. We can't expect our employers to see us as the real humans and craftspeople that we are. We have to enforce that ourselves."

This article was originally published on October 10, 2025 - read the full issue