After multiple reports suggesting mass layoffs at Xbox are imminent, many employees are bracing for the worst any day now. But among those Xbox studios that have already unionized, preparation for such an event looks a little different. Instead of just waiting for the bad news to arrive through an email or meeting invite, union members are preparing to fight back.
In recent years, Xbox Game Studios has steadily filled up with various unions represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). They include everything from Raven Software QA testers and wall-to-wall unions across various game teams at Blizzard to developers at Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, and Double Fine. Most of those unions are still bargaining over their first contract. The union at Double Fine, a studio Microsoft is reportedly trying to cut loose, hasn’t even been formally recognized yet.
But the unions for ZeniMax QA testers, Raven Software, and Blizzard Albany have secured collective bargaining agreements and those contracts stipulate how Xbox must conduct any layoffs it wants to do, including how much severance it has to provide to the affected workers. For those without contracts, Xbox must negotiate with each union individually over the impacts of proposed layoffs. After years of bargaining, these groups are quite clear on what they want, and they intend to fight for it, not as a bunch of small, separate teams, but as a unified group.
I spoke with Zenimax senior encounter designer Morgan Goin and Blizzard senior editor Alison Veneto following a CWA press conference yesterday where union workers from across Xbox spoke openly about the current reports and rumors of major cuts. Goin and Veneto tell me that the various Xbox unions have been sharing notes and working together for some time now as they all push toward contracts. Sometimes that looks like borrowing language Xbox already agreed to in one contract to speed along another. Sometimes, it means a bigger union with more leverage fights harder for conditions that a smaller union might not be able to win, potentially opening the door for other contracts to include them.
For instance, they tell me that Xbox was quite stubborn on “recall rights”—which require the company to rehire laid-off workers if their same positions reopen within a certain period of time— for its QA unions. But the larger developer unions think they can move the company on that sticking point.
“But one of the big asks across Xbox Studios, is transferring people into open roles at other studios. They have all of these studios, you know, the roles are similar on various games. If you have the skill set, [why can’t you] just apply at another studio or even apply at your own studio? Can we just move people into the open positions?”
There are a lot of personalities with big feelings, and that they sometimes have very strong feelings about who should be let into their little fiefdoms, and they feel that their little fiefdom is super special, and has all these little special little requirements, and they could not possibly be asked to just accept another person who has been working at this other place just fine for five years, because what if it doesn’t work out? And that there is a lot of hesitancy into transferring people even within [Zenimax].
For now, none of these unions have even been officially contacted by Microsoft about the reported layoffs. Goin tells me that during last year’s Zenimax cuts, the union was told only roughly an hour before the public announcement was made, and they expect something similar will happen the next time around as well. The Zenimax union at least has tried to get more clarity from the company about what’s going on: in a planned bargaining table session following the reports, union representatives asked the company representatives if they could tell them what was going on. The company lawyer claimed to know nothing about it, and the others in the room (HR, other lawyers, and studio leadership) offered nothing further on the subject.
So, lacking clear information from the company, union leadership is preparing for layoff negotiations anyway. According to Veneto, the World of Warcraft union had already shared a layoff proposal in bargaining a few weeks ago and Microsoft had rejected it. But then, after the recent layoff reports, “CWA really started to talk to them more, even just through the weekend to try to push that along because we did have language that was in active negotiation to see if we can just push it forward now that it is more relevant than when they put it down a few weeks ago.”
Veneto expresses frustration that Xbox has dragged its feet on contracts for so long, something that was mentioned in the press conference too. “A lot of the other units at Blizzard have put down things that have already been approved on the Warcraft table and they won’t just approve them for everybody,” she says. “We understand that businesses have to business, but the uncertainty is maddening. We just want to know that they’re like making a real effort to keep our jobs and to acknowledge that we are people with hopes and dreams and kids and mortgages, and to treat us with compassion. And that if layoffs happen, we know what is happening, right? Like, we know we have a contract. We know we have recall rights. We know they’re going to try to transfer us. I know what my severance is going to be. Even just me planning the next five years of my life or something. I’m like, all right, well, I know I would get this many months of severance. So in terms of my other budgeting for my life, we can’t be certain we’re always going to have these jobs, but we can be certain of what would happen if they went away.”
Goin also points out that even the unions without contracts aren’t toothless in negotiations for their members. “The other big thing about having all of us be part of the same kind of parent union in CWA is that you have the development teams behind World of Warcraft and all of BGS that are in active negotiations right now. So they’re not bound by a no-strike clause in a contract. And that’s a very big lever to pull. And I think they know that.”
The unions are also trying to use this moment to help those at Xbox who aren’t unionized yet. They’re working with the direct join union, United Video Game Workers, to try and get protections for even non-unionized Xbox workers. “The whole point of the union, CWA, is that we are here for the workers, all the workers, whether they’re part of the union or not,” Veneto says. “We’re trying to unionize video games as a whole.”
She continues:
I came from the film industry. The entire industry is unionized, and that’s the future we would like to see. Also, because we have protections to some extent, CWA was talking to Microsoft over the weekend on behalf of Blizzard and these other companies. We were able to call a press conference this morning, and other workers don’t have that ability. We have some degree of protection, and there are a lot of workers who currently don’t have any degree of protection. It’s like, all the unionized workers have these layoff protections…can we just give this to everybody across the board?
They’re also encouraging other studios to unionize, too. Unions take time, and no union is going to magically appear tomorrow that can suddenly stop potentially imminent mass layoffs. But Goin and Veneto point out that layoffs have been happening annually at Xbox for a while now. Even if they can’t stop these, more unions mean more protections for the next time, and they won’t have to start from scratch. Future unions will have the foundational contracts set by all these other unions to build off of.
“This is a pattern that they’ve established, so we’re expecting them to at least attempt to do this going forward,” Goin says. “It’s something that I think becomes more reasonable every year to start doing if you haven’t already started. All they’re doing, if they attempt to break up unions, is they’re going to seed the rest of the games industry with very motivated people.”
Goin and Veneto say there are multiple cross-Xbox Discords where people can find resources both about unions and also just how to handle layoffs. “We’ve put together resources for like layoff watch and layoff warning stages,” Goin says. “Like here are the practical things that you can do now to get ready. Like here are some things to think about for your portfolio. Here are some ways to get your finances in order.”
I remark that it’s a bit grim this sort of thing exists at all.
“That’s all we can do for our members right now because whenever they’re not being given anything by management, they immediately all turn to us and go, what are we doing?” she replies. “And we don’t know either. So the best thing we could come up with is, okay, well, here is how you can get prepared because we don’t know what’s going to happen. And regardless, whatever happens that we, I know we have done the most that we can do, even if layoffs happen at this point, the industry is small. Reach out to your former coworkers. We were, I would be happy to give anybody like recommendations or tutorials, like, you know, basically reach out. It’s mainly on Discord right now, but reach out to your community of unionized fellows and see if we can help because a lot of us are just dying to do something.”
