“Hundreds” of games workers at ZeniMax Media have voted to authorize a strike against parent company Microsoft after “nearly” two years of negotiations, according to a release from CWA last night. Union organizers may now call a strike if those negotiations continue going sour.
“Members of the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA bargaining committee are continuing to take a stand at the table over better wages, workplace improvements, and key concerns, including a lack of remote work options and the company’s replacement of in-house quality assurance work with outsourced labor without notifying the union,” CWA’s announcement says. “Before a series of nationwide member rallies, including when ZWU-CWA members walked off the job in Maryland and Texas on a one-day work stoppage, CWA filed an unfair labor practice charge against Microsoft for unilaterally outsourcing work.”
“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,” says Senior QA Tester Zachary Armstrong. “None of us wishes it had come to this, 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.”
ZeniMax Workers United-CWA formed over two years ago and at the time was the first games studio union at Microsoft (there are several others now, including the Blizzard union). The group represents QA testers on the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises, among others. It doesn’t include all of the ZeniMax Online Studios workers, i.e., the rest of the Elder Scrolls Online team; they have their own (even bigger) union called ZOS United-CWA. There’s also a separate union, One BGS USA, which represents broader swath of Bethsoft devs.
