Lessons from Labor Union Organizers

[Music] hi everyone uh welcome to lessons from labor organizers um we're going to be doing kind of a moderated uh q a panel at the beginning and then halfway through we're going to switch into kind of an open mic audience q a so be thinking about your questions leading up to that yeah so my name is emma kanema i'm a labor organizer with game workers unite i'm joined today by justin malito the director of organizing of the writers guild of america east liz shuler the secretary treasurer of the afl-cio um linda dao a labor organizer with sag-aftra and kevin agawatse the treasurer and an organizer with gamblers in that uk union um yeah yeah it's a great group of people um so before we jump into any questions i think we might just go down the road and do a brief self introduction maybe

expand on what your title actually means in terms of the work you do um justin do you want to start sure hello and uh thank you so much to game workers unite and to all of you who are so interested uh in in the idea of collective action and uh perhaps building unions in your industry um my name is justin molito i'm the director of organizing for the writers guild of america east what that means is as an organizer i work towards helping people who want to build unions in the industries that they work in into the into the house of labor and so specifically at the writer's guild we're the union for film and television workers there's an east coast and a west coast union we also have a large number of news members about 3 500 members in new york city and and the east coast uh recently uh that number is over five thousand uh because we've organized about 20 uh

digital publishers so places like vice vox future [Music] talking points memos salon slate and a bunch of others have organized with us fairly recently so that's the work that i've been involved in with a team of organizers most recently to expand the power of the union to new groups thank you liz hi everyone liz shuler i'm the secretary treasurer of the national afl-cio which is an umbrella organization of 55 unions riders guild east and sagafra are two of those we represent 12 and a half million working men and women in the united states and canada and we are working across all industries and sectors which are you know anywhere from professional football players to professional technical engineers to teachers and construction workers and

my role is basically as an organizer as well came from my local union out of the electrical workers and we are excited to talk about the future of work and what that means for working people what this country is starting to look like in terms of employment and getting your fair share of the wealth that you create on the job uh linda hi i'm linda i'm an organizer with sag-aftra right now i work closely with voice actors those who work in video games foreign language dubbing and tv animation so i deal with new organizing and internal organizing so new organizing is what similar to what justin said we're trying to organize new shops but with internal organizing we also deal with collective actions and building collective power to have leverage while we negotiate existing contracts and kevin hi i'm kevin augustine i'm the

treasurer of gamer state uk we're a very new trade union for games workers in uk we've partnered up with the iwgb which is like very young democratic militant union to get into space and improve conditions awesome thank you and yeah thank you again for being on the panel um so i kind of want to start off with um i think probably a question for kevin um what lessons have you and the other kind of fellow workers and organizers from game workers unite what lessons have you kind of learned and what obstacles have you been having to overcome as you kind of spin up your new national union and starting to organize game workers all right so like as opposed to like unionizing shop by shop like performing a national union you sort of have a lot of members like the most union friendly in a lot of companies but we don't necessarily yet have a big membership in any particular shop so

um it's like nice that everybody in union right now is like very active and wants to get involved but we still need to build like campaigns in all the shops in the uk and the other sort of thing is we spoke to like a lot of the big and established unions and um like the games industry space where there's a lot of like highly trained professionals that do that like very different things from r to programming community management um and it is very like globalized international it's like a space that traditional unions um aren't super sure how to approach yet like that's a space that has been traditionally not unionized and um it is uh a challenge figure out how to do it yeah and uh i mean you're talking about uh you know spaces that are traditionally not unionized just and you of course have quite a bit of experience organizing kind of new territories where workers aren't unionized can you maybe expand on some of the challenges involved in that

yeah uh in in 2015 um some um writers from gawker media just show of hands do people know about gawker and maybe the campaign to organize at gawker great came to our office um because they were interested in in organizing a union and we immediately began to work with them uh in an approach that in some ways was different than traditional labor organizing approach and in some ways quite similar the thing that was different is that um this sort of premium on transparency from people that worked at gawker made for a process that was much more horizontal in terms of how the organizing happened meaning that you know all of the decisions and and all of the activities were uh public and uh so public in fact that they were all on a blog as people were deliberate deliberating on whether or not to organize which is pretty unique um i share that anecdote because the

most important thing uh most important lesson really there is to make sure that we listen as organizers and as the labor movement um you know when we're trained as organizers we're told we have two ears and one mouth and therefore we should be doing twice as much listening so as an institution and as as organizers we listened very closely to what it was that people in the digital media sector were saying they were talking about overwork underpay the precariousness of the industry some some traditional bread and butter labor issues but they also spoke a lot about diversity and equity um and and the need for transparency and decision making and so we emphasized in our communications the importance of that and in fact as organizers really just facilitated the communication that happened as opposed to being the institution uh and communicating on behalf of of the workers they they uh also had the added benefit of being professional

communicators so it would be pretty foolish for us to uh redo their communications about why unions were important and then lastly one lesson uh that was extremely important and has maintained uh throughout is having a movement approach meaning that we're not talking about just organizing one shop and one place that happens to be either the bad place or the harder place to work we're talking about organizing the entire industry so that standards are set across the board no matter which company you happen to be working on any given day which of course is you know is very important when in this economy as people jump from job to job we no longer live an economy that people go to work at one factory for 30 or 40 years they jump from place to place and so therefore the union effort and movement has to be across all companies across the entire sector and really based on the labor as opposed to any given particular company and then lastly very much using

the technological tools that people use at work having those tools be used in the organizing campaigns so use of slack use of twitter campaign were all very effective for developing solidarity and building strong unions yeah i feel like gameworkers unite has also kind of taken up a lot of those approaches right using communication methods that workers are already using being more flexible thinking about building movement and as opposed to just focusing on individual shops yeah that's that's really interesting and i think that applies a lot to our industry as well um linda so i mean i think i mean you do a lot of work in terms of like organizing with voice actors and um i've always been really impressed how voice actors are often directly involved in the organizing campaigns just in the way that the writers justin works with have been directly involved can you speak to a little bit of that process and maybe touch on how you feel like voice actors and organizing with

sag-aftra relates into the larger labor movement within the games industry as a whole sure so maybe i should start off by giving a little overview of the last interactive negotiations and the strike so when we're in negotiations 2016 we had been negotiating trying to reach a new agreement for almost two years so finally the proposals were too far apart for us to feel that it was a good agreement so eventually there was you know strike authorization vote and we did go on strike and three of the main issues were one was transparency they wanted to know either the name of the game or the genre or if they're sexually explicit or racially explicit or violence in the game so that they can make a decision on whether they want to audition or even work on the game and secondary payments was a big deal because with actors usually they

get residuals on other contract areas and this is a model that works for them because it's not guaranteed that they work every day not even guarantee that they work once a month so having a secondary payment on the back end really helps while they're in between gigs and the other issue is vocal stress because a lot of these games they're exerting themselves or screaming they're dying like a million different ways so like vocal stress was a big issue because if they strain their vocal cords too much they might get bleeding swelling might have to get surgery so that means they can't work if any of those things happen so that's kind of like the overview the big issues that they were fighting for so even while they were negotiating and bargaining for two years they started off doing one-on-ones so it's basically doing your initial conversations figuring out who's the leaders in the community who's really influential and then building like a leadership structure kind of like a core group to

strategize and reach the larger community to assess support and they did things where they would do house meetings they would do caucuses at the offices smaller group meetings mixers and then obviously they had a facebook group that they would chat with and do education and they did a newsletter using mailchimp and just always keeping the community in the loop and educated about everything and they still do that now where even though there's no contract there's no negotiations happening that they still actively use that new that facebook and that newsletter to keep everybody updated and they're continually doing issue-based organizing because we couldn't get exact language for what is vocal stress on the contract that they're continually partnering up with industry professionals to do all-day workshops and evening panels so that we can look into

this even more and figure out oh how do we protect voice actors from losing their voice and um i mean kevin so i mean i feel like a lot of what linda just said is stuff um that you all do in the uk right a lot of and it really it seems to boil down to community building right at the end of it right yeah um can you speak to like how community building works into your organizing model uh in the uk i mean there's a lot of those things that we do right you have a new slide that is bi-weekly you have a discord where people can speak to us we are going to have like a weekly meeting just with our membership where everybody can just join and like ask questions about what they're doing or ask how they can get involved we have like regional groups and local meetings once a month in like different regions so just people can meet up in real life and actually get to know each other we just constantly communicate what we're

doing like and it's like very important because a lot of people in the games we have essentially no idea what a union is how it works and what it does and it's really important to show like what how we're helping people which we actively do but it can be hard if you're just working somewhere you're crunching you're trying to focus on yourself or maybe on your mental health or your kid then it's really hard to like actively stay engaged in what the union is doing so we need to show people the good we're doing yeah i feel like education has to be a very core component especially when it comes to these like new territories where people aren't familiar with unionization they aren't familiar with a lot of the kind of labor rights and things that come with that right um liz i mean so in a lot of your work uh you do a lot of involvement with like you know young folks in the industries um who are wanting to get into labor um and you know organizing new territory

what component does like education play in that and like how how does the afl cio play into that some of those things absolutely and it's been um so interesting to listen to the panelists so far because i think you're seeing a lot of examples of creative and innovative organizing across different sectors and i want to complement emma because what you all have done to come together collectively already just since last year i think it was birthed right at this conference yes it's just been tremendous because it does take some guts right to step out there and talk about these issues and there's a lot at stake and what i've been hearing from the panelists so far the theme is is workers taking risks and workers who want to get a return on the value that they are creating for these companies uh and in the economy and i don't think it's a lot

to ask when you're in an industry that is three times the size of hollywood uh for you to be getting a fair return on the work and the risk that you are putting into the product that you're creating so that is what it means to come together in union whether it's in a union or collectively in some other form right um and that's the beauty of this is the law protects workers who want to come together collectively no matter what your workplace looks like uh or what kind of work you do so that's what the afl cio tries to do as an umbrella organization is lift up the organizing of the various affiliated unions that belong to the afl cio but really speaking out for working people across the economy no matter if you're in a union or not because we all deserve basic rights on the job we all deserve fair pay and and protections inequality and transparency and accountability

which was spoken to earlier on the panel as well and so it really is about this power dynamic right and what we're seeing not just in your industry but everywhere is that there seems to be this concentration where the profits are going to a handful of people and the working people are the ones getting the short end of the stick not getting the value on the risk and the return that you you should be seeing in your work and so just a couple of quick examples we're seeing activism unlike we've seen anywhere in a long time um obviously in your industry but most recently um in the hospitality industry um unite here is the union that represents uh hotel and restaurant employees housekeepers room attendants um who just went on strike against the most profitable hotel company in the world marriott and

they wanted fair wages of course um and better working conditions because you can imagine uh the stress and taxation that is happening to a room attendant who's lifting up you know heavy mattresses and dealing with cleaning materials and making sure they have those safety protections on the job but they also were fighting for protection against sexual harassment because of um you know guests in the hotels and what they encounter when they are cleaning rooms also technology and the introduction of automation in industrial kitchens and robots for when you check into a hotel they wanted a voice in how that technology was going to be implemented in their industry so they used their collective bargaining process with their union to have enough power at the table to say here are our ideas and this is what we would like to see so that was an example of workers coming together most recently along with teachers who have been you

know out on the picket line saying you know enough's enough we want better uh smaller class sizes in our classrooms and you know more school supplies so we don't have to buy them out of our pockets um so i think this is a moment we're calling it a movement moment that you're a part of yeah um and i mean you touch on you know hospitality workers service there's you know burgeoning labor movements you know not just in games but in technology um and and you recently published an open letter to game workers you know calling on on them to unionize and start organizing with one another and um that the time was kind of right for that um why do you think it is that not just in the games industry but the kind of really the whole national picture um why do you feel like labor's kind of resurging in this moment like what do you think creates these kind of conditions and that kind of ties to your first question about education i think people are starting to discover that hey we don't have to just sit back and take it we do have a way to fight back and i think people

have a lack of awareness that you can form a union for the most part or they have old stereotypes about what unions are i cannot tell you the number of times i get on an airplane and people ask me what i do and i say i work for the labor movement and they either look right back down at their book or they say oh that still exists i thought that was back in the 30s or whatever you know for people who work in steel mills and yes that's true but i think in this moment where our economy is becoming so fluid and work is looking different and as you were saying about um nobody works in one place for 30 years anymore right um we are we are experiencing a modernization and a surge in people wanting to come together collectively like we haven't seen before because of what the economy has been doing right it's been repressive and the fairness and inequality uh is absolutely non-existent and people are feeling very alone

and this is a way to fight back yeah um so in your in your letter you know you're talking about now is the time to organize um how do you feel like as the secretary treasurer of the afl cio and national kind of umbrella org of all these different labor movements and unions how do you imagine um game workers and tech workers in general fitting into that national picture like how do you imagine us incorporating into the larger hole well this is so incredibly exciting because the world is your oyster right there is no one particular way to do this and i think we could benefit from your creativity and your innovation in thinking about what a model could look like now there are models that exist and i think that could work for this industry as well i came out of the electrical workers union right where electricians who work in construction are moving from job to job it's very dynamic it's very fluid they get all their training through the union because they're

constantly coming back to the union as a center of gravity they get their benefits through the union people think portable benefits is a new conversation it's not because for over 100 years unions have been doing this right so that is a model that exists now there could be a model like a guild for example that uber drivers have formed in new york where they come together and they fight against not only company policies and to be recognized that's how the tipping policy was changed actually with uber as the independent drivers guild went to the company and said this is absolutely locking us out and then also certainly with the taxi cab commission and the regulatory framework they're able to use their guild to leverage that um there could be a model where you might be a member of the afl-cio for example directly independently and we could provide support and infrastructure but i think the one thing to think about is there's the movement piece of this but there's also the organization

piece of this that's so important and a lot of people think yeah we got a movement but you also have to have an organization to be able to deliver on the goals of that movement yeah um so i kind of want to make sure we have like a nice decent chunk of time for audience q a but before we get on to that i think it'd be really nice to take a moment and yeah kind of step back maybe from that larger picture of everything but to people who are maybe new to the labor movement people who are new to organizing and talking to their fellow co-workers about these kinds of things each of you i'd like to hear just briefly kind of like what maybe a general tip you might be you would just give to someone who's just starting out and maybe like what first steps would you uh recommend them kind of following justin do you want to you want to start off yeah i think that um um boy it's hard not to jump in on the uh the economic uh situation for people in the industry and the big picture um but can i just say one little thing about that is that um

what's happening is is the massive disparity of of wealth inequality in this country is uh i i feel like i'm preaching to the choir here but i feel like it's worth saying that there are a few people that are taking everybody's money and making people work like 60 or 70 hours a week and giving them uh just enough for them to survive to continue producing wealth for them and that's the moment that we're in that's the moment that this country has been in in the past and this world's been in the past and the solution to that situation is mass organizing into militant strong labor unions and that's i feel like uh it is a moment it is happening people are doing it and it's up for institutions to figure out how to interact with that and provide the necessary resources for people that are on the front lines fighting that um and i think that that's also what's really exciting is that's happening everywhere across our industry and

people are looking to fight back and we have to figure out how to help support that and that's not necessarily helpful day-to-day advice so i will circle back to that and say that beginning to have conversations with people that you know and trust about what's happening at your work space what's happening in your working lives is the best way to start you know you'll find that there's obviously tremendous fear about collective action because the corporations that you work for are in a structure where they have most of the power but you'll also find that when you have open conversations with people who are experiencing the same or very similar situation as you are that there's going to be tremendous solidarity and tremendous receptiveness to at least talking about those things so just to elevate the the notion of community building we do a lot of happy hours we do a lot of coffees a lot of teas where people just start

breaking down the isolation that they're facing and realizing that it's not just them who are facing these problems and that it's actually a systemic approach for companies to maximize profit off of your labor that happens through one-on-ones and that happens through people coming together collectively and then the next step is trying to build that organization um and that that that will come after but really just developing the solidarity by talking to each other about what you're experiencing thank you liz um i think the education piece is really big in knowing your rights and emma can be also a support source for that but also the broader labor movement is here you've got a whole table full of people who want to help and so us being there to answer questions and encourage you along the way and support you so knowing your rights and then as justin said talking to each other you're used to living in an open source

environment and solving problems collectively um have those conversations with each other and think outside the box i hate that saying but i'm gonna say it anyway but you know it's it's why not be brainstorming new ways of doing things and and we can be there as a labor movement infrastructure to support you along the way awesome thanks uh linda what advice would you have for someone just starting out yeah i'd really stress the importance of one-on-one and the building trust amongst one another and because when you're going through these organizing efforts these are going to be the building blocks and the relationships you carry throughout every step of the way you want to make sure that people are educated you're talking to people that people are involved and are excited to be involved so one-on-ones are super important yeah and kevin yeah i feel like i'm putting you to a quiet year but yeah it is talking to your co-workers talking to

the people you work with and figuring out their problems building connections because like a lot of you in this industry are marginalized or feel isolated and believe that they are facing these problems alone by themselves when we're all facing those problems and we want to stand up together to like fight for better conditions so this it's not just like figuring out what our problems are right is building actual human connection to form like a culture of care where we care about each other and we care about our problems we care about solving the issues you're facing together yeah and i'll add my two cents um i think everyone kind of touched on it really but kevin you really articulated a fellow organizer once told me that to her organizing is about building a culture of care in your workplace right and in your industry and i think that's really kind of a profound and very sweet way to approach organizing right it's about building a culture of care and that means actually listening to

people hearing their problems genuinely caring and like it doesn't matter what their position are on unions and things what what role they play in the industry genuinely approaching them with genuine empathy and care about their situation and learning to listen first and you know not just lecture and and share stats and things but focus on emotion and story um i think that's at least something i would i would definitely uh share with new organizers um awesome so we're going to move into the audience section so if you have any questions or advice or um that you want to seek from from our panelists there's a lot of really wonderful perspective and kind of and knowledge to share up here so we could go all night but we've got about 30 minutes yeah we'll start over here hello what are the unique challenges presented by say indie developer where you might be alone or working part-time in a different industry and in your free time making games

sure justin you want to take that one thing that as i've looked at and just starting to learn a little bit more about this industry is that the the independent developing development scene looks a little bit to me like the independent film scene in in our union and so often times people will wear the hat many different hats and do many different things within within a production and so the things that have worked for our union in that space is the community building and so we'll have an independent film caucus where people who are working in isolated uh situations can come together and talk about their craft talk about funders talk about the various issues that are impacting them as individually and look for common potential common solutions related to that or just get together and talk to other human beings seems to be actually a value for folks in that and then also the union um has a contract uh that can be negotiated whereby you would be um if you're the indie game

developer and you're working sort of as a self-owned or self-produced uh entity that you can actually become signatory to the union contract and become eligible for health insurance and that contract was developed as independent filmmakers got together and talked about ways in which that contract should be structured um and so um indy if if by india also means some smaller companies um then i think it's important to take um an industry-wide approach so that not just one or two of them are unionized but all of them are well i'm talking about people who are not in a shop specifically can i add an additional part to that question briefly yeah what about uh groups that already exist say like the igda branch of your local thing how will that how will game workers unite distinguish itself from that or be joined into that maybe they don't want to be joined into it but the community

already exists i'm kind of like thinking of these like case scenarios edge case scenarios um i'd actually like to tackle that um for clarity um when it comes to labor organizing it always happens on a shop-by-shop basis it's a very local grassroots approach even if it's a part of a larger national or international movement it's always about the individual workers in the shop coming together to find whatever path forward and whatever issues they want to work around and what solutions they want to find and so in that way it really is up to the individual groups of workers in their studios to find out their own path um and so yeah if if they want to find community in solidarity in the igda or gameworkers tonight or any community really that's wonderful and game workers unite is here to help with education and providing organizer training and kind of building up the general skills of the populace but um really it's it's again about that local shop and they might choose to go with any one existing union um they might

choose to keep their own independent just themselves union right um they might also want to form a as a collective of other shops that are unionizing a larger like national union say it's very flexible and it's up to what the workers themselves decide does that provide a little clarity on that yeah thank you for sure if i could add a couple of thoughts here um that has been a debate around you know traditionally we we've seen people organized around craft so for example i used my union electrical workers where all electricians in the country based on their craft organized a union then you have also this sort of more horizontal um industry example of you know steel workers uh you know in their companies would go across a company no matter where that company's footprint was they organized by the company in that particular industry and sometimes you could have an industry-wide you know all the companies coming together too at one table where

we've had models like that but for folks who are independent who aren't employees there's a distinction there because under the national labor relations act you're not eligible i guess to form a traditional union as an independent contractor so that's where we're seeing these new models emerge where i mentioned the uber drivers guild where they still can come together collectively to leverage their strength right because you're more powerful together than you are on your own and so they're organizing in different ways car wash workers taxi drivers you know folks who have been on their own feeling alone have a way to come together um and bargain or negotiate so the afl cio is exploring this right now because we're doing a future of work initiative where we're thinking how can the labor movement actually think more creatively more fluidly about how work is going to be organized in the future because there is as we know this push to try to employers to try to you know

skirt responsibility to be honest right they don't want to be an employer anymore of course we're going to fight that but we also need to figure out a path forward for workers who want to come together in a different way so it is about scale and i would guess as someone who works on your own independently you still want to have access to affordable health care you still want to have access to um you know perhaps maybe one day buying a home and getting a mortgage who knows right and also discounts on things that you know when you are part of a large organization you can get cheaper um access to staying at a hotel or whatever it is so i think we're looking at a model of how we can open up the labor movement scale to leverage that for workers who aren't necessarily employees if that makes sense thanks for the question um yeah over here so uh very similar to my question uh so i'm a freelancer and i've debated putting up on my website

discounts for studios with union labor that employs union labor is there any other way that freelancers can support our fellow workers in uh big bigger studios than just discounts or showing up to meetings um i feel like either linda or justin could probably tackle that linda do you want to take a stab one of the things that since we've started organizing in digital media the folks that have been able to join the union and be part of the collective bargaining agreement are the staff and staff workers at places but just like in your industry in the writing industry there's many many freelancers who are either doing an article here and there and and are not eligible to join the union and so we've uh we have a sort of an adjacent effort of freelance solidarity that happens where people who are in the freelance space come together at our union office and look for collective solutions to try to either increase the

rates that they're part of or to support contract campaigns that places that they write for are part of and so that requires uh just like liz was saying um thinking about things a little bit differently and adapting to uh the actual economy that's in front of us which includes multiple freelance pools of labor and multiple ways that companies frankly are working to get around uh having traditional employee employer relationships so um i think as long as a lot of the same things apply if you're if you're freelance and and that's about building community building collective power if you look at some things the national writers union has done in terms of uh they've done lawsuits around non-payment for magazine publications and have been really innovating doing new collective actions for freelancers so i would argue that uh it's it's going to be extremely important to make sure that freelancers are part of any future

unions within your industry um linda yeah do you want to touch on that as well yeah i think it's a matter of you know what justin touched upon it's like where you have a space where you can also stay organized even if you're not particularly in that bargaining unit of the union because one example of sag-aftra is that choreographers are not considered part of our union but they a lot of them actually are members by because we do cover dancers but then they created kind of like their own space but also work closely with the union where you know they call themselves a choreographer alliance and use this alliance model where they still you know have a lot of autonomy where they can create their own meetings they teach classes do fundraising and they still talk to one another and are able to actually create minimums for each other so i think there's still ways like using kind of like that alliance model of like this is kind of like the on-wrap to activism and organizing and

they're able to do that but also be in solidarity with the dancers and the union and work together i just want to add because it works slightly differently in the uk in uk even if your freelancer a contractor or you have no job you're allowed to join the union that is just fundamental right of every person in the uk that you have the right to train union and one of the things that we at our like solidarity workers in the awg achieved is that for deliverable and uber drivers they formed the union for them they successfully united and in high court they thought that these carriers are recognized as employees with full employee rights sick days vacation paternity maternity leave because you know it's sad different yes but there's one thing that a lot of people work on like rolling contracts of from years to like just a couple of weeks that i actually like there should be full-time employees that should be bought in-house and just get a regular

salary and regular benefits and that is also something we are trying to fight for thank you i'm sorry another thing that we're experimenting with that might be relevant is bargaining for all so that for example the ufcw commercial workers are in negotiations with big grocery stores and they've invited non-union workers to their bargaining table because they're going to bargain for lifting standards for everyone so that might be also an outlet in the future thank you um so there's been a talk about a lot of talk um about organizing by trade specifically like um linda you were saying um for example that choreographers aren't um included in sag after sag-aftra sorry um can you talk a little bit about like a solidarity union model where um you're

organizing you know not necessarily just the game workers but like everyone in the shop like including janitorial staff and using the leverage that game workers have as folks who have um a little bit more of like specific skills and therefore leverage um in order to raise the standards for workers in their shop who their bosses might see as more disposable heavy air quotes i think that's really crucial do you want to tackle that or yeah so even to continue talking about choreographers like we know that they're they have a super specialized skill set and usually they will be in solidarity with the dancers because a lot of them grew up and trained as dancers and are you are part of our union because of dancing so they would even

show solidarity with the dancers where they can you know say that we want this to be covered this project to be uh covered by union contract and um they've been building and then the choreographers will go to other shows like say they go on tour with a musical artist where they're like okay and then they still float that idea because the choreographer there's only like there's a smaller set of choreographers doing this kind of work and then they're constantly getting work so if they go to like say on tour then they can also float that idea of like we want this to be you know covered by union contract we want union dancers and you know help organize in that way so that there is that solidarity and that education going on and they um were able to that's still like an ongoing effort to organize music tours but they were able to do it with the justin timberlake tour in 2012 and then recently he went onto our last year and then that they were

able to make that a union tour as well awesome and yeah and i would just further expand by emphasizing that at least for for me and i think a lot of people in game workers unite we really do buy into the industrial model of organizing which um kind of as you were describing means exactly what i was describing yeah to reiterate is kind of um yes about like organizing all workers across all disciplines because it's a little harder to separate people when we're all banded together in one big group and i think a part of that absolutely it absolutely is organizing all workers if you have any role to play in the work of our companies in our studios making games and i mean genuinely like engineers artists writers qa testers right community managers i i mean the folks who work down in the cafeteria or who maintain the building everyone's playing a hand here right like everyone's enabling this medium that we work in right and i think it's super essential to yeah as as we've been saying include everyone when

when we're trying to improve our workplaces yeah great thank you sorry people might also be with campuses we've been seeing you know that solidarity come around in college campuses where you have you know obviously the faculty you've got the grad students organizing you've got cafeteria workers and they're leveraging you know each other's strengths um in some cases the whole campus is organized and and they help the cafeteria workers lift up their voice you know and also in silicon valley we have an example of what we call silicon valley rising where you saw at facebook and google and other places where shuttle bus drivers cafeteria workers and security guards organized a union because of the support in the silicon valley area of all the other labor unions coming together lifting them up and using every tool at our disposal whether it's capital strategies with our pension funds and leveraging you know shareholders meetings it's you know legislative and regulatory pressure strategy to get the

company to pay attention media you know so we bring all those tools to bear together in a particular geographical area to help workers who may not necessarily have as much of a voice and to button that i would also say i i think we genuinely have a lot to learn from those people who have organized right those cafeteria workers those shuttle workers those maintenance folks um we have much to learn from them and they are already doing that work in our studios right in our companies right at facebook and other places um so we have a lot to learn from them uh and i think that's a healthier relationship we should be continuing to develop thank you thank you hi um thanks for coming um so there are entire parts of the video game industry that rely on free labor that generates money for companies for example like streaming or like kids making skins for minecraft um like another more well-known example of this from another industry are like buzzfeed quizzes and i'm just wondering uh how has this

happened in other sites of organizing and how has it been addressed and are these people considered to be workers are we bringing them into these efforts thank you so you're kind of talking about community-made labor and products of labor how does that fit into this yeah awesome question does anyone want to tackle that i mean one thing actually with uk i'm from union is deciding on who who's eligible eligible to join i've got to go out the line is it a professional esports players they get a salary from the company that makes the game are they considered game workers freelance games journalists like where do we people who work on middleware for games working like havoc are they considered game workers and one of the things you have that is that anybody who is involved in the process of making games at some level is in the union but when it comes to like user generated content when it comes to like modders or

youtubers which just seem as very esports players there we draw the line because like the the game is like a very big big space where it is hard to get like the solidarity you need from all the workers um so like until we can like really get a foothold in this industry we don't want to stretch ourselves too sin and like try to cover too many bases um maybe linda or justin this i think this is kind of slightly also related to things like spec work and in the industry we kind of yeah definitely have an issue with people requesting spec work which for those who aren't familiar are you know requesting essentially free labor free examples of you know your creativity or ability before actually hiring you or paying you right we even had a very notable example at last e3 where um ubisoft had a program that was essentially um asking for community spec work um is that common in maybe your industry i

i would assume as well maybe yeah that's that's an ev even um you know in the film and television industry and for script writing it's it's quite common and uh the the way that folks have addressed that is through a collective bargaining agreement that sets out the standards for uh what people are paid for for doing labor and uh and in order to get there there just needs to be um you know a common understanding of the people who are doing that work and a shared responsibility to hold each other accountable to not working for free but that problem definitely doesn't go away with a union because people are doing work that they are passionate about and they care about and are trying to break into an industry so that's definitely a challenge with or without a union frankly thank you yeah hi any advice for students who especially undergrad who want to raise awareness and stuff in

schools that sometimes uh the teachers are a bit more old-fashioned about this especially because i don't want to rest on my laurels and say oh it'll be so by the time i graduate we'll have a union by then um yeah does anyone want to tackle the kind of subject of students how they fit in as far as activism yeah and getting them involved yeah there's an organization called united students against sweatshops that is very active on campuses speaking out of course their the motivator for them or the reason why they formed was because of the college athletic wear that was being sold on campus was being made in sweatshops in other countries and they wanted to change the standards uh for what they could sell on on campus right we want clothing that's made using you know folks who are being paid a fair wage and um aren't being taken advantage of so that activism kind of branched out and uh now is um i think a very fluid organization that um turns over in

leadership quite often because the nature of students coming and going but it's been evergreen um and i don't know you could look them up online probably but also you know you're able to start a chapter of your own if you want at your campus in terms of connecting with the players in your community and being a voice on campus for the organizing that's going on in the community i would also say there's kind of an inverse relationship too to be mindful of um at least with game workers unite we do a lot of work around preparing like education materials for students about you know not just the reality of the industry but also basics of like how to advocate for yourself in the workplace and things and i think it's super important that we include student voices in our organizing work because even though they might not be workers now they certainly will be in a few years and this industry is really hard for new people um jumping in can feel like going right into the deep end and i think as much as we can prepare people for it is really essential so

your voice and any students voices are super welcome and appreciated um in the movement and i would encourage everyone to get involved for sure okay thank you we probably have time for about one more yeah so um yesterday we spoke a bit about how in a union you can't have anyone who's got a hiring and firing power and like looking at the business cards you've been giving out you know there's lots of executives on there but you know there's no supervisors there's no lead developers and a lot of these people would be um exploited as well by the executive class they would be at risk of the layoffs like frontline workers um is there a labor organization model where like us frontline workers can unite with them to form a united front against the um uh against um uh uh the the the the uh highest levels in the companies um nothing that i'm familiar with does anyone have any other questions oh yeah it was really hard for me to hear i think the question was about um people

being part of the labor unions who are um technically under labor law statutory supervisors or otherwise ineligible right is that what you're asking uh yeah yeah so basically like like low to mid-level managers who would also be at risk from uh abuse from executives uh and how they can help us uh form a united fund against this this kind of executive overpay we've been um i should the organizing that we've been doing uh since 2015 has been all outside of the national labor relations board the national labor relations board is the entity that enforces the national labor relations act and that is to us essentially a law that is designed in many ways to prevent workers from organizing um and so we've been operating outside of that law which gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of bargaining unit composition meaning that people that that law may consider to be

supervisors or managers or otherwise unable to join a union can in fact join the unions that are being formed at the companies where people are working and um that is a that requires tremendous solidarity of the people that are organizing and um and it's much more difficult to have folks like that included and you have to leverage the company to agree to that through using direct action tactics and public shaming and whatever else you can find in your arsenal up to and including the threat of withholding your labor in a strike but we have found it to be useful to have unions that have more people in them um who sometimes have more power in them uh to get better things from the company um but it's definitely a it's a challenge i would also tack onto this that i know you're from ireland and so um something to note also is that you know we're talking about the national labor

relations board and that's very u.s centric and i think the thing to to really say is that the legal framework and context around labor and unions and things really does vary a lot by country to country and that's something that would just have to be researched for your actual communities and studios but yeah to build off of what justin was saying it isn't in terribly uncommon that you know managers and supervisors creative leads things like that can be sometimes included in an organizing campaign and i think just to extra emphasize something i think justin was hinting at us i think it's really crucial that when you're organizing with those types of folks one i would say you bring them on a little bit after when you've already organized many of the like kind of base level workers and secondly when you're organizing ensure that the actual structures of the organization and how you run things and how voices are represented in the democratic structure of the union is is taking into account the kind of natural

power dynamics that some of these leads and directors and supervisors tend to have in the company so that way they're not overrunning anyone's voice yeah one small point is the scenario we see most often is very confrontational but there are scenarios where employers and managers actually will work with you to form a union and they are rare but they do happen and i guess we should maybe approach it always first with the rationale that hey we're in this together we're creating value at this company when we do better you do better we all want to see this company succeed so we want to form a union just so that we have a seat at the table and you know we want to be a shareholder so to speak and have a voice and so i come from a tradition where that is the case labor and management are together in lockstep because we are the skilled trained talent that make them money and they know it so the union

benefits them in this way so i guess that's one thought i had when you were talking about management is that we can't always assume that they're our enemy um and because in some cases middle management benefit when there's a union in the company right because we're raising that lifting time or that raising tide lifts all boats that the managers actually end up benefiting when there's a union in the workplace yeah and i think it of course it's always throughout that process even if we go in with good intentions and assuming the best of folks always having that kind of caveat there you know absolutely that the the relationship is inherently one where the workers and the bosses have different needs and interests that's more common yes yeah um and yeah i i think that's a wonderful question thank you um thank you very much yeah um so we are now out of time uh thank you for you know the panelists for being here today um it's really awesome to hear all your perspectives and voices thank you for your questions um i some of them i actually hadn't heard

before and so it i think having these conversations and these these trickier questions are really really helpful um i also want to say thank you to um our wonderful techs who are running the conference there are siblings in labor at the ayatse local 16. every single session that you've been at this week has been run by union labor yeah and it is them who make this confident conference as smooth and wonderful as it is so we are deeply grateful thank you for doing the work that you do i also want to super thank all of our cas who are are just doing an amazing job they have so much on their plates but they do it with such like passion and kindness and just endless support and your labor is also very much valued even though you're only here one week out of the year you're still doing very excellent labor and we recognize that

and we wish you the best as well and finally i would also say please thank all of the service workers who are working around the conference the people working at moscone and yerba buena work very hard to make sure that this place is a safe and comfortable environment that's clean and friendly and very approachable so please do thank them when you're kind of spending your final day here at gdc um and then yeah lastly i would just say i'm supposed to remind you that uh you'll have an email in your inbox uh for evaluations please do fill them out they are very helpful for both the conference and those of us up here who you know really would appreciate the feedback on how the panel was run and what kind of content you'd like to see in the future right and then finally we have a round table community round table just in 15 20 minutes um it's uh in the uh south hall in room 216 and we would really encourage everyone

to come out we're gonna have a really great discussion about next steps and talking about granular problems we're all facing and how people can get involved and we would love all your voices to to be there as well but yeah thank you thank you so this is what we really don't want to follow down that hole again where they're pitting you know workers against other workers because you know the more people that are organized the better industry standards we can create so you know sag-aftra totally supports us the voice actors totally support this so anyway we can support we're all for it and this is super exciting for us thank you