A video game coalition represents about 300 workers at Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout Zenimax Media publisher who voted overwhelming strike if they cannot eliminate agreement on wages and conditions at the workplace with Microsoft’s parent company, Zenimax. The unified and Microsoft workers have bargained both such as remote jobs and testing for operating games for nearly two years; Now, they say they have prepared the tools if their concerns are not resolved.
The QA staff founded Zenimax Workers United in December 2023, as part of the U.S. Union of the United States Media Workers (CWA). Microsoft acknowledged the trade union at the time, but as Brendy pointed out in a previous article, this is likely not to be a sign of the empathy of the alliance between leaders. Microsoft has previously signed a Viking neutral agreement with CWA to lubricate the wheels of the acquisition of their activities, allowing workers “freely and fair to make a choice of trade union representatives.
Last year, Zwu participated in a one -day strike declared that Microsoft did not adequately solve the interests of employees about their return to office policy and processing practice. According to a statement made yesterday, their members are continuing to stand up the table for better salary, improvement of workplace and main concerns, including lack of remote jobs and the company replaces quality assurance jobs with outsourced workers without notifying trade unions. Now they have voted more than 94% to approve their leaders to start a strike if Microsoft does not give them a contract to solve these.
The cost of payment and expensive RTO initiatives has made many of us pause our lives because our income is not suitable for the increasing cost of living in the cities where Zenimax affirms that we live and work to maintain jobs, high -end inspections of QA Zachary Armstrong in statement. None of us hopes it has come to this, but if Microsoft and Zenimax continue to prove at the negotiation table that they do not want to pay us for our labor value to our games, we will show them how valuable our labor is.
The deputy checker QA Aubrey Litchfield added: Despite being one of the largest corporations in the world, we had to constantly fight for a minimum of the ceiling. Time of illness.
Recently, there have been many trade unions actions at Microsoft companies. 241 Bethesda game studios started an union associated with their own CWA last summer. 461 online Studios staff Zenimax monitored in December. Ignoring the conditions of payment and work, many of these workers are worried about work security and the influence of the AI tools for their livelihoods. Microsoft has sunk billions to develop Genai, and fired thousands of people in the process of acquiring their activities.
Nic was at the forefront of our Trade Union report. This is his work on a recent announcement of an alliance throughout the industry of CWA, aiming to not only build the community and the solidarity between video game staff, but also to build large -scale educational campaigns in organizing labor in the video game industry.
Update April 4, 2025: Microsoft spokesperson commented on the above story as follows:
Our quality assurance team is an integral part of our business and is the key to our ability to provide the games that our players will love. Accepted, it will lead to an instant compensation, even more powerful and linked to the company’s hybrid model for 3 days at the office.
