The fight to organize the gaming industry made it to the White House on Thursday. There, Alex Speidel, one of the senior organizers of the United Paizo Workers, met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh in the Oval Office. The meeting was confirmed with an official photo on the President’s Twitter account.
Present in the Oval Office with Speidel were members tit productions (The Legend of Vox Machina) organized under the IATSE. Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls was also there. Smalls, the most prominent union leader present at the event, was asked by his chairman, Senator Bernie Sanders, to testify before the Senate Budget Committee.
“It’s not a left or right thing,” Smalls said, speaking about the right to unionize without illegal management interference. “This is a working-class problem, and it’s the workers at the bottom who make these corporations go.”
Sanders took the opportunity to slam what he called Amazon’s anti-union activities. “Amazon has done everything possible – legal and illegal – to thwart union organizing efforts,” he said.
While workers at Amazon distribution centers across the country struggled to organize their jobs, workers at Paizo had a much smoother path to voluntary recognition — that is, formal recognition as a collective bargaining unit by Paizo management. According to Speidel, the last push came with the help of a contingent of freelance authors who simply stopped accepting new work.
According to a Paizo Workers press release, Speidel told President Biden how these freelancers “began to turn down orders from the company in solidarity with the workers’ request for voluntary union recognition.” This collective action, Speidel said, is key to empowering full-time workers.
“It was truly an honor to be able to discuss the CWA campaign to organize gaming and tech workers and to share the incredible work of the United Paizo Workers and our team of freelance writing,” Speidel said in the press release. “I hope that administration will continue to support workers organizing to join unions across all industries and that we will be able to return that momentum to CWA to continue the CODE-CWA campaign. Every worker deserves a union!”
CODE-CWA was founded in 2020 with the help of Emma Kinema, co-founder of Game Workers Unite, a grassroots organization dedicated to organizing the video game industry. Ironically, they’re the workers at a company best known for its pen-and-paper role-playing games scout and star finder who helped show the way. Additional unionization efforts have since emerged at Raven Software (part of Activision Blizzard) and Keywords Studios, which work with BioWare and other developers and publishers to provide quality assurance (QA) support.
