Game developers who are part of the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union working at Microsoft's subsidiary ZeniMax Media overwhelmingly voted in favor of giving their leaders permission to call a strike after failing to reach a deal for the union's first contract after two years of negotiations.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA), who helped the ZeniMax employees form their union, announced the news in a press release on Tuesday, saying that members of ZeniMax Workers United-CWA voted 94% in favor of authorizing strike permissions. Which, to be clear, just means that the leaders negotiating the deal with Microsoft now have the ability to call a strike. It doesn't exactly mean that a strike will happen.
"We’re not afraid to use our union power to ensure that we can keep making great games," said Skylar Hinnat, a quality assurance tester and member of ZeniMax Workers United-CWA.
Hinnat continued, "All of us want to be working. We hope that Microsoft will allow us to do so with dignity and fairness to all by securing a first contract with our union."
Some of the key issues the ZWU-CWA is bargaining over are expanding remote work options, better pay, workplace improvements, and mandating that Microsoft inform the union of any intentions it may have to outsource quality assurance work to a third party.
Specifically on issues like return to office mandates, senior quality assurance tester and ZWU-CWA member Zachary Armstrong said, "Underpayment and costly RTO initiatives have caused many of us to put our lives on pause because our income does not match even the rising cost of living in the cities where ZeniMax insists we live and work to maintain employment."
"None of us wishes it had come to this," he added, "but if Microsoft and ZeniMax continue to demonstrate at the bargaining table that they’re unwilling to pay us fair wages for the value our labor provides to our games, we’ll be showing them just how valuable our labor is."
When the ZWU-CWA was formed at the top of 2023, it was the first union to come from a game studio under Microsoft, and it was also immediately one of the largest unions in the video game industry in the US.
As part of its campaign to push its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King through, Microsoft signed a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA to demonstrate that it would not prevent its employees from unionizing. Now that Microsoft has what it wants, it has seemingly yet to make good on any of the promises it made regarding its position towards unions and labor organizations.
"Despite being one of the world’s largest corporations, we’ve had to continuously fight for what should be bare minimum. Paying your employees a livable wage as a multi-trillion dollar company is the least they could be doing; however when addressed at the bargaining table, Microsoft acts as though we’re asking for too much," said quality assurance tester Aubrey Litchfield.
"Our in-house contractors have been working on minimal wages with no benefits, including no paid sick time. Workers are choosing not to start families because of the uncertainty of finances. We’ve released multiple titles while working fully remote. When will enough be enough?"
