The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is launching an industry-wide union of video game workers in North America …
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is launching an industry-wide union of video game workers in North America and Canada, which it says will help “build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status”.
The CWA has been at the centre of many of the successful US games industry unionisation efforts over the last few years, with 2024 seeing announcements of unions at the likes of Bethesda Game Studios and Blizzard. Its newly unveiled United Videogame Workers (UVW-CWA) operates a little differently to a traditional certified union, however, serving as a direct-join industry-wide organisation – said to be the first of its kind for the games industry in the US.
The nature of the UVW-CWA means any freelance or full-time video game industry worker – artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, and beyond – can join if they’re based in the US or Canada, with dues calculated on a sliding scale. And it’s also open to industry musicians, having been launched in partnership with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).
