by Sarah Jaffe
Yet the hype for Silicon Valley continues, and ambitious programmers don’t want to just be labor, anyway—they want to be startup founders, the next Zuckerbergs themselves. Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and Trump buddy, advises would-be founders to “run your startup like a cult.” Cult devotees, of course, will work their fingers to the bone out of love, not for money. Not many people consciously want to join a cult, but as Losse pointed out, there’s another name for a group that inspires love and commitment and unpaid labor, and it’s one that tech bosses cheerily invoke: the family. As Kevin Agwaze said, though, families don’t lay you off once a year.40
Better by far to be your own boss, and start your own startup, even though startup founders themselves are reliant on the bigger boss—the venture capitalist. Author Corey Pein recalled asking a VC if startup founders were capital or labor. His “cheerfully cynical” reply was this: “For every Zuckerberg there’s one hundred guys who basically got fired from their startups. They aren’t capital. They’re labor.” The wannabe Zuckerbergs are their own kind of gig worker, scrambling individually to make a buck, just on a grander scale.41
Rather than leave to become startup founders, some tech employees have instead taken a page from the Tesla factory workers, or indeed, from the workers who serve them those catered lunches: they’re organizing. The Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) began with an engineer and a cafeteria worker turned organizer who challenged a few of the shibboleths of Big Tech—namely, the idea that different kinds of workers have no interests in common, and the assumption that the programmers have more in common with the Zuckerbergs of the world than they do with the working class. It built slowly for a while, and then, after Trump’s election in 2016, a burst of action drew many new recruits, both to the TWC and to Tech Solidarity, a group begun to help tech workers find ways to act on their anger. The first actions of many tech workers were to challenge their companies not to work with Trump. IBM employees petitioned their CEO, Ginni Rometty, asking that IBM not work with the Trump administration as it had with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. Nearly three thousand workers at a variety of companies, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google, signed a “Never Again” pledge promising they would not work on projects that would aid the Trump administration in collecting data on immigrants or racialized groups. Amazon workers demanded the company not provide facial-recognition software to law enforcement; Microsoft employees called on the company to stop offering its cloud services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).42
The first real tech-worker union drive, though, came at a smaller company, Lanetix. The problems began with the firing of an outspoken programmer. Coworkers described her as a stellar employee but said her questioning of company decisions had gotten her sacked “out of the blue.” If she could be fired like that, the others began to worry for their own jobs, and decided to unionize with the NewsGuild. “As soon as they started to compare notes, they realized that each manager was just trying to individualize the complaints that everybody had,” engineer Björn Westergard explained. But after sending a letter to management requesting recognition of their union, they were summarily fired. All fourteen of them. The story spread through the industry, and they filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board—retaliation for forming a union is illegal. Before the NLRB hearings could proceed, Lanetix settled with the fired workers, paying out a total of $775,000 to them. One of the former workers called it “a landmark win for tech workers.”43
Which brings us to Google, a company that—with its mini-golf and climbing walls and free food—is a dream job for many. That is, for those who get the coveted full-time-hire white badge. For others, who come into Google only as temps, there is the red badge, and interns get green. The inequality rumbling through Google, as with Lanetix, wasn’t limited to a few malcontents, and it spilled over in 2018. There was another petition, this time over Project Maven, an artificial intelligence program that was to be used with military drones, and some workers quit in protest before Google gave in. But it was sexual harassment that got the workers to organize as workers.44
There had been rumblings before at Google. A wage discrimination investigation by the US Department of Labor “found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” according to DOL regional director Janette Wipper. The anger sparked by the investigation was fanned by the distribution of a memo written by a Google employee, James Damore, who insinuated that the gender gap in tech labor was due to inherent differences between men and women. But the Google walkout—by tens of thousands of employees across multiple countries—came after the New York Times published a report of widespread sexual harassment and impunity for perpetrators at the company. The $90 million golden parachute given to one executive, who was forced out after he was accused of sexual assault, was too much.45
The walkout took place at 11:10 a.m. in every time zone, rippling across the world (and Twitter) in an impossible-to-ignore wave. The organizers gave credit to the women who’d organized in the fast-food industry through the Fight for $15, as well as to the #MeToo movement, which began online after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused of numerous instances of sexual assault. “A company is nothing without its workers,” the Google organizers wrote. “From the moment we start at Google we’re told that we aren’t just employees; we’re owners. Every person who walked out today is an owner, and the owners say: Time’s up.”46
That organizing was followed by demands, in the summer of 2020, that Google end its contracts with police departments. Tech workers joined in solidarity with protesters across the country, calling for defunding and abolishing policing after a Minneapolis officer killed George Floyd. A letter signed by more than 1,600 Google employees read, in part, “Why help the institutions responsible for the knee on George Floyd’s neck to be more effective organizationally?” Amazon programmers, meanwhile, had been organizing to support the company’s warehouse workers, protesting their dangerous working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, the tech workers were taking their lead from those on the front lines.47
Suddenly the tech industry no longer seemed so impenetrable. After all, these behemoth companies operate with a relatively tiny workforce. Google’s parent company only broke the hundred-thousand-employee mark in 2019, and Facebook had a little under forty-five thousand employees at the end of 2019. This means big profits, as Moira Weigel noted in The Guardian, but it also means that individual workers still have quite a lot of power, and it doesn’t take many of them to shut things down. If workers could organize at Google, one of the world’s most powerful corporations, and pull off a massive collective action that spanned continents, what else is possible?48
THE FIRST STRIKE IN THE VIDEO-GAME INDUSTRY WAS CALLED BY VOICE actors. Members of one of the old Hollywood unions, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), struck against eleven of the biggest games companies for just over a year. They were calling for residuals and royalties to be paid to voice actors, like those film actors enjoy, and though they did not win those demands, they did win raises and proved that games companies could be brought to the table to negotiate with a part of their workforce.49
To Kevin Agwaze, at the time, the victory seemed far off from the work he was doing. There was a sense from the developers, he said, that they were the ones doing the real work of making the games, and the voice actors just showed up and talked—a sense that echoed the companies’ treatment of the actors. He’d been in the United Kingdom for just a few months at the time and remembered thinking, “Yeah, it’s bad but that is just how it is.” He thought he’d be able to adjust, to work his way up the ladder. But the discontent was bubbling up around the industry.
It boiled over at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. A panel was scheduled for the conference titled “Union Now? Pros, Cons, and Consequences of Unionization for Game Devs.” The people putting togethe
r the panel, Agwaze explained, were closer to management than the rank-and-file developers, and a group of developers who were talking union began to organize around the panel to get pro-union workers to attend and ask questions. What had begun as a Facebook group, and then a chat on the Discord service, became a campaign that now had a name, an official website, flyers, and a goal: Game Workers Unite (GWU).50
After the panel, Agwaze said, the discussion of organizing snowballed. People joined the Discord chat, and then began to start local chapters where they lived. The conference was based in the Bay Area, but as workers in a massive international industry, the developers knew they had to take advantage of their reach on the Internet to start chapters on the ground where they worked. They talked about crunch, but they also talked about sexual harassment and discrimination. And discrimination was something that particularly drove Agwaze to get involved. “A bunch of these problems, they just get progressively worse if you are a person of color and LGBTQIA person,” he said. “They become factors compounding an already shitty environment.” His actual work experience has been fine, though the long hours persist, but, he recalled, “in school, they asked us for a current figure in the industry, in your field, that you look up to, relate to. I couldn’t name a single Black person in games.” He remained, at the time we spoke, the only person of color at his company, and for him the union was a way to speak up for marginalized people in the industry.
Most of the games workers had no experience with unions; the industry’s age skew mitigates against that, but it is also true that young workers are driving a recent uptick in unionization in many industries. The workers have also needed to be creative about organizing. The UK group moved from the Discord chat into offline spaces, and then into forming an actual trade union for games workers, one of the first in the world. Agwaze is treasurer. After talking with a variety of different unions, the games workers became a branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB). A relatively new union begun in 2012, IWGB represents mainly low-paid immigrant workers in fields that had been long nonunion: cleaning workers, security guards, and gig economy workers like Deliveroo bike couriers and Uber drivers. It was both a strange and a perfect fit, explained Game Workers Unite’s Marijam Didžgalvytė.
The games workers in many ways, obviously, are better off than many of the workers who are already part of IWGB, but they bring a militancy that can be infectious, and the union holds social events to bring members together in a solidarity that reaches beyond the picket lines. The games workers’ social media reach is a help for the other workers as well. And social media helps the union reach a key audience: video-game consumers, who are notably vocal when they dislike a game, but could be marshaled, too, to support the games workers. A recent campaign to “Fire Bobby Kotick,” the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, who received a multimillion-dollar bonus after laying off eight hundred employees, drew plenty of attention from gamers and the games press. Laying off workers while juicing stock prices with buybacks and raising investors’ dividends is a fairly common practice in today’s economy, but the campaign aimed to make the human cost of such practices visible to gamers. Didžgalvytė said, “I think the players are beginning to understand that the people creating their games are suffering.”51
The GWU-UK union was helped by the United Kingdom’s labor laws, which do not require the union to win a collective bargaining election in a particular workplace in order for workers to be able to join. Other workers in other countries have different challenges, but the demands of the UK union, voted on by the membership, are largely the same as the demands elsewhere. They include improving diversity and inclusion at all levels; informing workers of their rights and supporting those abused, harassed, or in need of representation; securing a steady and fair wage for all workers; and, of course, putting an end to excessive and unpaid overtime. “We try to avoid the term ‘crunch’ because it sounds so funky,” Agwaze explained. “‘It’s crunchy! It is cool!’ No, it is excessive unpaid overtime.”52
Because of the developers’ relative power in the industry, they have been able to put forward demands on behalf of less powerful workers. Issues like zero hours contracts—work contracts, in the United Kingdom, where contracts are common, that do not promise workers any hours or give them a regular schedule—are still pervasive in the lower levels of the industry, particularly for workers doing quality assurance (QA) testing. Some QA workers, Agwaze said, even get paid per bug found in a game. “This incentivizes the wrong thing,” he noted, and it also means that someone could spend hours poring over a game, find nothing wrong, and make no money. GWU’s concern even extends to professional game players in “e-sports” leagues—which tend to be owned by the companies that produce the games. A company, Agwaze explained, can just wipe an entire league out of existence if it no longer wants to pay for it. And the workers wanted, too, to make demands on behalf of the people who did the work to produce game consoles in the first place, from mining rare minerals in the Congo to assembling the products in factories, often in China.
There is still a tendency in the industry, which affects workers’ desire to organize, to pretend that it is apolitical. “We make great art, we don’t make politics,” is how Agwaze summed up this argument. Yet the games, he pointed out, are inherently political, from war games (discreetly funded by the military) to superhero games, like a Spider-Man game that featured Spider-Man using police-operated surveillance towers to track down criminals. “How can this not be a political statement?” he asked. Online gaming culture had a track record of toxic culture, particularly the right-wing “Gamergate” movement, and that kind of culture rubbed off on the workplace. Games companies, in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, rushed to put out statements saying Black Lives Matter, but they rarely, Agwaze said, acknowledged the conditions they created inside their companies.53
One of those companies, Ustwo, billed itself as a “fampany,” an awkward portmanteau of “family” and “company.” It proclaimed its commitment to diversity and inclusion, but when it fired Austin Kelmore, GWU-UK’s chair, its internal emails criticized him for spending time on “diversity schemes and working practices,” and for being a “self-appointed bastion of change.” One email, shared in The Guardian, proclaimed, “The studio runs as a collective ‘we’ rather than leadership v employees,” but also said that Kelmore had put “leadership… on the spot.” (The company spokesperson told The Guardian that Kelmore was leaving for reasons unconnected to his union activity.) GWU-UK fought for Kelmore, but even before the pandemic, such processes took time; after the pandemic, they were backed up even more.54
Agwaze’s time organizing with GWU-UK had taught him that companies were often less efficient and practical than he’d expected. “They’re more of a chaotic evil,” he laughed. Few of them were aware of the labor laws, or of how their actions would be perceived. Then, as with the Black Lives Matter protests, they scrambled to try to win some goodwill through largely symbolic actions, like donating money to racial justice organizations.55
Still, all of this reflects the start of a change in the industry, signaled by the rise in political awareness within and about games. Members of the UK Parliament have even formed an all-party group to look into the gaming industry, though Agwaze noted that GWU-UK’s invitation to speak to the group had been delayed as a result of Brexit and the general election in December 2019, and then because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, it marked a change from the assumption most people had, he said, that “it’s fine, because it is video games. It must be fun, even in its working conditions.”
With the pandemic, Agwaze said, some of the union’s usual means of gaining new members—in-person meetings and speaking engagements—had to be scrapped, and the 2020 Game Developers Conference, where they’d planned a panel, was postponed. New members were finding them anyway, however, because of immediate problems on the job. “They are more like, ‘Oh, shit is on fire right now! I need to find some union assistance!
’” he said. Workers at some companies were being furloughed, but being asked to keep working without being paid. Others were being told they had to go to the office despite the lockdown. And then there was the immigration question. The games industry, Agwaze noted, depended on immigrant labor—he himself was an EU migrant living in the United Kingdom, a status that could be disrupted by Brexit and, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the government’s intention to crack down on migrants. The pandemic exacerbated these problems: workers who lost jobs were unsure about their visa status, and with the backlog at both the Home Office and employment tribunals, there was a lot of uncertainty among workers that brought them to the union for help.
All of this meant progress—and more challenges—for Agwaze and the union. The workers at games companies, and in the broader tech industry, were finally starting to understand themselves not as lucky to have a dream job, but as workers who are producing something of value for companies that rake in profits. After all, as Agwaze noted, “for the one and a half years we’ve been around now, we’ve been the fastest-growing branch of the IWGB. We’re the fastest-growing sector that they’ve ever had.” The union is a crucial step toward changing power in that industry and claiming more of it for themselves.
CHAPTER 10
IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES
Sports