IWGB Game Workers recently launched their first manifesto in an effort to gain better working conditions for their 1,500 members. The group’s driving ideals center around better job security for workers and the industry’s reliance on forced overtime which is also known as “Crunch”.
The group was founded five years ago and has said that their membership has grown exponentially as of late with the recent layoffs throughout the industry, with spike of 50% in the past 12 months. The chair of the IWGB Game Workers Branch, Austin Kelmore, stated that:
The games industry has reached a tipping point. After another year battling this relentless onslaught of layoffs, workers are realizing that things urgently need to change, and are unionizing on a scale never seen before.
The people who choose to work in the games sector are some of the most passionate, creative, dedicated people you’ll ever meet, and studio bosses rely on that passion to exploit us without fair pay, conditions or job security. Together, we can make sure the games industry’s future looks very different. Stable work, fair pay, a balanced work schedule – all these are well within reach if we stand together to demand them in unison.
The manifesto centers the group’s intentions on ensuring “no overtime” rules cannot be enforced and any voluntary overtime is properly compensated. They also discuss pushing to a 4 day work week and ensuring mental health and sick days of leave. They also discussed proper pay for employees, including the gender pay gap by instituting a Gender Pay Gap service that would require submitted data on the payment of employees. Lastly there is also a desire for equal parental leave for both genders and ownership models/benefits that will allow employees to share in a more fair manner to share in the equity of the company’s profit.