And only a third of developers want to see worker unions at studios
Half of developers believe that, if they were to form a worker union, they would face resistance from their employers.
As part of a survey conducted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), around 820 of the 1,607 industry respondents said that forming any union to galvanise workers’ rights would be met with opposition.
And around a third of those thought that such opposition would come by way of “threatening or harassing” unionists, with the remainder suggesting that such opposition would come via issued information.
This might be a key reason why only 34 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they would openly welcome a union formation. A quarter said they would personally be opposed to worker unions, while 42 per cent declined to comment.
The survey revealed that only six per cent thought their employer would support a union.
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The data comes as part of the IGDA's new push to educate workers’ rights in the wake of the ‘Rockstar wives’ scandal.
The association has established a new Quality of Life Special Interest Group, and has kick-started its new initiative with a wide-ranging survey of its membership.
The full details of that survey will be offered at the upcoming Game Developers Conference, but Develop has been granted an exclusive sneak peek at some of its most critical findings.
The preliminary results show that 42 per cent of those surveyed believed existing labour laws protected them from a grievance between employer and employee. However, 47 per cent of the 2,159 respondents were unsure if they did, with the remaining 11 per cent claiming that labour laws wouldn’t provide protection.
Develop's exclusive look at the IGDA survey can be found here.
If there's one thing my recently departed Dad taught me after a lifetime of seeking justice - both as a unionist and one of only a very few survivors of Christmas Island - it was that if the creation of something is threatened by those that fear its creation then its creation is both necessary and inevitable. I've called for talk of a game dev union before. I'm glad to see others starting to debate it.
There is a union in the UK for game developers. BECTU. While it is film, TV and theatre focused, if things go wrong it's useful to have someone backing you that knows things like labour law, redundancies, not getting paid, etc.
I've knocked it in that past thinking "what can they do for us? they're not even us" but a lot of the legal stuff is generic. It's kind of like having insurance against bad treatment. And the likelihood of such things happening in our industry are sadly quite high.
