Tech Won't Save Us - Why Game and Tech Workers Are Organizing w/ Emma Kinema

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Emma Kinema to discuss how workers are organizing in the video game and tech industries, the challenges faced by those workers, and the importance of organizing to improve workplaces, but also larger economic structures.Emma Kinema is a former tech and games worker who is a Campaign Lead with the Communications Workers of America on the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. She also co-founded Game Workers Unite. Follow Emma on Twitter as @EmmaKinema.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com and Passage at readpassage.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Emma spoke about labor organizing in the video games industry at XOXO Festival.Paris wrote about why game workers are organizing in Australia, Canada, and France.In January 2020, GDC’s State of Games Industry report found 54% of game workers thought they should unionize.Workers at Riot Games walked out in May 2019. Workers at Blizzard Entertainment walked out in October 2019. Workers at Lovestruck went on strike and got an average raised of 78%.Rockstar’s co-founder said there were 100-hour weeks ahead of Red Dead Redemption 2. Bioware workers said “depression and anxiety are an epidemic” within the company. CD Projekt Red said there wouldn’t be crunch on Cyberpunk 2077, then enforced it anyway.Support the show

It's essential that we organize in tech. You know, it feels impossible now, but I think we're going to look back and see it as inevitable in the future. That's the work in front of us right now. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Emma Kinema. Emma is a former worker in tech and in games, and she's a campaign lead with the Communications Workers of America on the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, or CODE. She's also the co-founder of Game Workers Unite. In this episode, we talk about the organizing that's been going on in the video games industry, particularly in the past few years, and how

game workers have been speaking out more and more about the conditions that they face in their industry and in their workplaces. This is a really important conversation because, as we've discussed previously on the show, there has been a lot of organizing in tech in the past few years. As workers have come to see that the companies that they believed were representing their values and, you know, the better world that they wanted to see, were not pursuing those goals in the way that they thought, but were actually focused on, you know, as many companies do, expanding their profits, even if that means working with corporations, with government agencies that are doing really negative things in the world. And games like tech is an industry where there's very

little unionization, but a growing number of workers are now organizing to try to change that. And Emma gives us a lot of insight into why they're doing that and how that's been going. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. The podcast network also got a lot of early support from Passage, which is a Canadian left-wing publication that publishes a lot of great critical insight into Canadian politics, if that's something that you're interested in. If you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues to, you know, let people know that you are liking the show so hopefully they'll listen too. And if you want to make sure I can keep making this show every week,

keep making every episode free for everyone so that there's more critical perspectives on technology out there in the world, you can join supporters like Sam Fettig, Simon Rodier, and Claudio Sarmiento Casas by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter, which will also give you access to our Discord server where you can talk to me and other listeners of the show. With that said, enjoy the conversation. Emma, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's great to speak with you. You know, I wanted to start by looking at game workers and kind of the progress that's been made in recent years with regard to, you know, the organizing that we're seeing and really the I think the

consciousness that we're seeing among workers as well. So for a long time, the games industry was seen as a place where I think work and leisure were kind of like the same thing. Now, instead of just playing games at home, that was your job. And that was like this kind of amazing thing for a lot of people, right? But I think that narrative has really shifted a lot in the past few years, as more stories have come out about working conditions in the games industry, and as workers have been speaking out more and kind of telling their stories, right? And so you co-founded Game Workers Unite, an organization dedicated to organizing game workers so they can have more power in fighting

for their rights and, you know, organizing their workplaces. Can you give us some insight into when it became clear to you that the video games industry needed unions and especially an organization like GWU to kind of move that goal forward? Yeah, for sure. I think long before I was ever in the games industry, I believe that the games industry needed unions because I believe every single worker on the face of the planet deserves the strength and dignity and power that comes through standing in union with their co-workers. But especially, you know, when I was in university studying game development and film production, that's when I really started thinking about it seriously.

I'd already been organizing for some time before that in kind of several different types of workplaces. And, you know, the more and more I thought about the industry, there was just such a concrete difference between what it meant to go into into film versus what it meant to go into games and kind of the crunch that comes with it and the lack of good pay and protections. And so going into the games industry, in terms of my career, it was definitely something that was kind of top of my mind. And kind of towards the end of 2017 and early 2018, I think increasingly more and more of us really from around the world had been talking more and more seriously about what would it look like to actually organize? What would it actually look like to put our money where our mouth is and not just talk about making things better, but actually doing the hard work of actually attempting to do that. And, you know,

I think a lot of things laid the groundwork for the creation of Game Workers Unite, the unionization of the digital press over the last several years, Gizmodo, Vox, Vice, on and on, laid some groundwork where, you know, there was increasingly more editorial independence. And that really impacted, you know, games coverage at places like Vice and Gizmodo and Vox. And that really, I think, enabled a deeper, more professional coverage of the industry that kind of went behind the scenes. And it wasn't just, I guess, enthusiast press, it got much more into the actual reality of the industry, the problems it was facing, what was like to work in the games industry, you know, starting to talk more about the broader network of all the different roles

and types of companies and outsourcing firms and essentially the effects of like globalization on the industry. And I think that laid a groundwork where more and more people in the industry were actually seeing themselves in a much more, I think, deep and reflective way in terms of the nature of their work and the nature of our industry and how it creates the work that we do. And so that coupled with, you know, a series of, I think, kind of, you know, notable events and kind of releases of games that had some labor themes and some other things really culminated in people realizing, like, I think the times now, now like we're starting to hit the tipping point where people are increasingly aware of conditions increasingly not willing to just sit by and watch things be bad i think it's time to like really push and so you know you kind of

get the founding of game workers unite that first 2018 game developers conference in san francisco where i think we're all just as surprised as anybody else that people actually really caught on to the things we were saying. And we kind of went from there. And I think we laid a lot of kind of good educational groundwork in the industry through Game Workers Unite, really launched kind of conversations in a different meaningful way. We saw the organizing of many different collective actions and the founding of different national unions came out of the movement. The riot walkout came out of the movement. You know, there's a number of things really. And a lot of things that also aren't public, because oftentimes a lot of collective action and workplace organizing just isn't public news. It's not a thing that gets talked about. But personally, at studios

I've worked at, I've seen people, you know, post Game Workers Unite, get together to like march on the boss and demand that someone who just got laid off is back the next day, and they come back, right? And that's worker organizing, but it doesn't, you know, show up on Vice or something. So there's been this kind of cultural shift, and kind of awareness shift, and that's enabled kind of a strong foundation on which organizing can build. But, you know, we're still very early on in that organizing. We're still really early on in building that really robust professional organization. And so, you know, that takes time. And, you know, we're actively organizing at, you know, game studios,

you know, all over the US and Canada with CWA. And I think there's a lot of work to be done, but I see it being very possible. And I think increasingly, more people are reaching out. And it's not just like activist types who are interested in this. I get a lot of really normal people just shooting me emails and being like, wow, I really can't take another day of this. How do we change this? You know, how can we make our workplace more professional, more stable? For me, it's a matter of time, so long as we put the effort into it. I think you make so many good points there. And what you talk about, about people becoming, you know, more conscious of it in this moment, I think is

so important. And kind of the role that I guess other, you know, industries unionizing has also helped to show people that, you know, industries unionizing has also helped to show people that, you know, this is very much a possibility that this is something that can happen in games and in tech. They are not unique industries in that way. And I think the point that you make about film is also really interesting, right? Because film and games are these two really huge kind of cultural industries. But in film, we see that there is, you know, really heavy unionization across the industry, whereas in games, that is not the case. Do you think that game workers can also learn from what film workers achieved, even though it was a long time ago?

Because I'm sure they experienced forms of exploitation that might look a bit different, but are in many ways also quite similar. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I feel like I sometimes get asked by people like, well, why is film organizing games isn't it's like, well, film's been around for nearly 100 years, and in the professional format that it is now 70 or 80 years, arguably. And, you know, they've just had time on us. And there was a time where the film industry was very much like the games industry now, where you got a lot of people flocking to a few major locations, working for a few major studios that bought everyone else up.

And people were working pretty terrible hours and conditions for the sake of, you know, this work that was, you know, really a dream job. It was passion work for them. And so they opened themselves up to exploitation because of it. But you get a couple of decades down the road, it becomes a more and more professional industry because workers are increasingly not willing to just be living 10 people on cots in a room to make sure that they can keep their job and afford to live in LA and things. They actually stand up. And I think things like, especially like animation organizing,

the kind of Screen Actors Guild organizing of the kind of mid 1900s is most interesting to me. But I don't know if there's anything terribly unique or special that, you know, sets them apart really from any industry that's organizing. But it is worth noting that they just have, I think, in some ways, time on us. And I think so much of what's enabling folks to turn towards proper professional organizing now is we've seen enough cycles of people coming into the industry for their dream job, stars in their eyes, really excited about it. A few years later, they've been working so hard that they burn out and they go work for some insurance company or something instead, because that's more bearable, even though it might suck

their soul out. And so we lose massive talent, like every year from people burning out of the industry, we lose massive amounts of, you know, really just craft and discipline development because we're constantly relearning the same lessons over and over because companies can't actually retain their people. And companies refuse to think about the long term importance of providing that stability so that we were constantly improving our medium in our industry. And, you know, the cycles happen over and over, and we've had the same conversations over and over in the press and on Twitter and in our studios about this exact dynamic. I think finally, people are kind of like, let's not go on that merry-go-round again, like, let's start fixing that shit. And so I'm pretty optimistic that we are hitting that beginning point kind of where, you know, you could argue film was at, you know, many, many decades ago. And there definitely are similarities between film and games in terms of the entertainment aspect. And it's worth noting that games on the whole actually generates much more revenue than even both film and music combined, which is, I think,

really kind of interesting and sometimes surprising because I think we still sometimes think of games as kind of like a kid's hobby or kid's interest. But some 80 odd percent of American adults play games, whether that's on their phone or on the computer or on a console. It really doesn't matter. It's all game development and it's, you know, game workers making it. So it is important that it's like a massive powerhouse in terms of entertainment and increasingly so in culture. But I actually think it does have more similarity to software development for a number of reasons. First off, the production process is completely different. It's not the kind of typical, you ramp up for particular

production. Instead, you've got these like phases and chunks to it. You know, people working in like Agile or Waterfall or these different kind of production methodologies that do not line up with the film industry. And you also see just huge technical infrastructure. The vast majority of the money spent on game development is mostly centered around the technological infrastructure, engineering teams, QA, internal tooling and network engineers and all kinds of different things. A lot of it really is designed around that more than anything else. And so I think it has so much more common with tech. And I think some of the unique aspects of organizing in both of those sectors are going to influence one another and inform one another increasingly as both become more and more organized. Yeah, no, I think that's a that's a fantastic point. And that gives us a really good insight into, you know, how to think about games and how it fits into this kind of broader economic landscape or landscape of workplaces and ways that work is done. And now

we've talked a bit about the issues in games and how people are becoming more aware of the issues that are present in the workplaces in the games industry. But we haven't talked about those specifically. So can you outline some of the issues that workers in the games industry face in the workplaces? We could be here for about six hours if you'd like, but to give the short version of the rundown. I mean, there's a lot of things that typically affect all kinds of workers who we have here, right? Like job instability, threat of layoffs and things once people aren't immediately needed. Massive, massive overtime, which is a phenomenon we call crunch in the games industry where it's both a combination of lots of overtime and also crammed into a particularly

dense period of work, usually leading up into some kind of major milestone or the launch of a product. And that can be really disastrous for physical and mental health. I've seen people really, really actually have genuine, real medical issues because of that dynamic. We have definitely pay and hiring and retention discrimination, the lens of race and gender and sexuality and inability. And I mean, gosh, I could go on. There's a huge, huge sector of the games industry that no one ever really pays attention about. The press never really cover them, which is like outsourcing workers, you know, a huge, huge portion of the industry are people who work for near minimum wage or minimum wage, have very unstable jobs with minimal benefits, if any, who really are kind of a true, like foundation, a productions foundation for the rest of the industry that enables the rest of the industry. And yet they're treated like absolute trash and seen as expendable. You know, and these are people who work in anything from QA to production to art, design, major, you know, AAA companies. And, you know, that's like this

really unseen kind of, I think, rot in the industry that people aren't aware of. Similarly, there's mass misclassification and exploitation of workers in kind of, quote unquote, temporary roles, you know, folks being hired through temporary staffing agencies. There's like different vendor companies that, you know, will quote unquote, hire out workers to places like Sony or EA or, you know, whatever AAA company. And essentially lets those bigger companies off the hook for paying benefits and conditions. It creates a two-tier workforce, which means not only is that bad for the people in that second tier, it's also bad for the people in that second tier,

it's also bad for the people in the first tier. If you're a full-time engineer, say, I don't know, Activision Blizzard, and there's temping workers also in your department or supporting the work of your department, that is a threat to them as well. That is a threat to their job stability and pay because so long as the boss knows they can have someone who's doing similar work but being squeezed for less pay and less benefits and less job stability, that will always be a slippery slope and that will always be something that the boss will be eyeing to expand. And that is the case because we've seen that expand year after year after year, increasingly

the use of temporary staffing agencies to skimp on benefits and pay and conditions so that the shareholders can get just, you know, 0.0001% more revenue at the expense of human beings having stable professional jobs and lives, being able to put food on the table, you know, that dynamic only increases. And that is a problem also for the well-paid engineers. It's something I talk to tech workers at major tech corporations, like the big five and otherwise, where less transparency, increasingly less worker participation and company decision-making processes. Pay is on the downswing relative to kind of cost of living. People have way more competitive and rigorous performance evaluation processes. We continue to see mass discrimination in terms of the hiring and retention and payment of folks in protected categories. And that is only going

to get worse because increasingly, they have more temp vendor and contract workers, they call them TVCs at Google, who are both suffering from essentially doing work that should be proper, full-time protected work with good conditions and benefits. But it also provides a massive slippery slope for the rest of the workforce. And we see every time Alphabet gets into some kind of financial trouble, every time there's a slight downswing in the market, they use that as an excuse, even when they're not suffering, when the C-suite and shareholders aren't suffering from that really, they use economic troubles as an excuse to do mass layoffs of entire teams or departments or portions of it. And then what happens like a year later, they staff that exact

same team and department right back up, but with temp workers, with contract workers, with people who don't have benefits and pay like the folks who did. And sometimes they even rehire the same goddamn people who were full-time employees with benefits and good pay now as temp workers. And so I can't hammer home this point enough. And this is also why it's so essential to see tech and games as a part of a bigger, broader Apple, Microsoft, you name it, across the entire broader tech industry, both games and more traditional software engineering, the dynamic is the same. And that will always be the case because management is always looking to find the tiniest improvements to their return on investment. Even if it just makes their

shareholders only a tiny, tiny fraction more wealthy, they will do it at the expense of the workers if they think they can get away with it. And that if is the main point, actually, because that's where organizing comes in, because the thing companies care about the most, and I know I'm way off on a tangent at this point, but the thing companies care about the most is money. And that's not like a judgment call. And I'm not saying anyone's like a mustache twirling villain, you know, running these companies. It's just how companies function. They have finance first as their consideration.

They want to make sure that their shareholders are happy. They have a return on investment. And that's the thing that makes them, you know, have decisions. They don't make moral decisions. It's kind of morally agnostic. They're looking at numbers and trying to make the numbers go up. And so organizing is like a perfect counterbalance to that because we, the workers, we don't care that the Q1 report is up, you know, X percent in whatever metric. We care that the work we're doing is meaningful

and high quality. We care that the workplace is professional and supportive and a place where real collaboration can happen, where people can actually get a leg up and really our communities and not just shareholders. And organizing can be the human counterbalance and counterpressure against the economic-only focus of management. So yeah, I've completely failed to answer your question, but each thing is kind of related to the other, and it's kind of hard to really just speak to one without getting into the other subjects. Yeah, no, that's completely okay. Tangents are completely fine, especially when they're, you know, so relevant and informative as, as that one. But, you know, what you described there is completely enraging. Often this outsourcing is, you know, I think in people's minds associated with companies like Uber and the larger gig economy, right? But we're also seeing this outsourcing across the tech industry, whether it's in video

games, whether it's in the white collar professions at Google and those major companies as well. And I feel like, you know, one of the areas where it's really obvious that management isn't thinking a lot about workers or, you know, really demonstrating care for workers is in the issue of crunch that you also brought up, right, which I think has been receiving kind of the most attention of the issues in the games industry. That crunch, which, you know, as you described, is when, you know, workers end up working really long hours for weeks or months, sometimes even years, which I think can really be chalked up to in part bad planning on the part of management or...

I'm sorry to cut you off, but I really want to counter the notion that crunch comes from mismanagement or like a bad production team, because I hear this constantly. And as someone who worked in project management, that is horseshit, because I will tell you, nobody makes decisions, you know, except in extreme circumstances around long term financial stability or long term viability for the company and the quality of the product. It's all about short's not crunch. Let's treat our people well. Let's make sure that we retain high-skilled, high-value, really seasoned workers so that way our productions are faster. We do move at a quicker rate. Our work is higher quality, but we don't do that. Instead, we make the choice to crunch people and shove things out the door so that at Q3, we have a good release so that the shareholders can be happy. And that short-term perspective that shareholders have, that short-term perspective that the C-suite has because

they're beholden to shareholders, that is the thing that creates crunch, short-term financial vision. Because arguably, a long-term financial vision would create more stability. It would push for a more professional long-term career structure. And I've literally seen that when production decisions are being made, it's not in competence. In production, we all know the rule of like, if someone says it's going to take a week, go ahead and book it for a week and a half or two weeks. We're not done. It's actually really easy to, I think, schedule out a project. But the thing that happens is then you have a really great production schedule, everyone's happy, the team's reviewed it, great, it looks reasonable. And then,

you know, the next day, you're meeting with the C suite or something, or some, you know, executive VP of production. And they're like, actually, no, none of this works, just cut in half, you know, figure it out. And it's like, that's not good for the game. That's not good for the workers. That's not even good for the fucking company in the long run. And it's like, that's not good for the game. That's not good for the workers. That's not even good for the fucking company in the long run. And it's all about that short-term financial gain. And that's not to say making decisions just because of long-term financial decision-making is good or it doesn't have its own problems and contradictions to explore, but it's just, yeah, I really want to counter that notion that it's often a mistake

in poor production planning, because I've never seen it be that except for one time. And that was on a student project where people didn't know how to make production schedules, right? Like every professional production team I've ever seen. It's never been, you know, mismanagement of any sort. It's been poor decision making from executive leadership. No, I think that's an essential point to make, you know, to really emphasize that point. And, you know, I just wanted to give some examples to really back up what you're saying there, right? Yeah. Because we've seen, you know, multiple times studios have controversy in recent years over

the amount of crunch that they were pushing on to workers. For example, Rockstar's co-founder said that teams were working 100 hour weeks ahead For example, Rockstar's co-founder said that teams were working 100-hour weeks ahead of the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. At BioWare, workers said that depression and anxiety were an epidemic at the studio ahead of the release of Anthem. And in this moment, we've seen it play out throughout this year. CD Projekt Red was in the news multiple times because it forced workers to work longer hours after delaying Cyberpunk 2077. And very recently, I think it was in October, the CEO had to apologize after telling the media that crunch was actually not that bad and never was, which, you know,

was completely untrue. So you've described a bit, you know, how this is really on the side of executive leadership. But what kind of effect does this have on workers, on their mental health, on their lives, on their ability to just like continue in this industry when they're being so overworked in this way? Yeah. And that's, to me, the most important question, because I could give less of a care about the financial stability of the industry because it's already not stable. Like that's not even a question to really even bother considering at this point. And the impact on working people is pretty disastrous to say the least. Now I have a

lot of friends and peers in the industry who have, you know, developed anxiety syndromes around the nature of work. You know, like you said, a lot of people develop things like depression. I've literally seen people diagnosed with PTSD, people, you know, who have suicidal kind of ideation during particularly difficult moments in production, especially leading up to major releases and management is kind of really showing its fangs to get it out the door. And that's not to say like every single person has that problem. But the fact that anyone is having that problem is a massive issue. And it's something that affects the quality of our games,

it affects the long term viability of our companies, and affects our medium as a whole. And again, most importantly affects those workers themselves. And I think it's something that's completely avoidable. I, you know, firmly believe that a lot of cases of anxiety and depression and all kinds of different mental illnesses and physical illnesses in the modern day are driven by economics in many ways. Instability leads to all kinds of ripple out, you know, mental and physical health consequences. And this is just an example of, you know, economic instability and pressure, creating it, you know, at least in this particular environment of the games industry, is completely unacceptable. But management, more times than not, and I think the exceptions prove the rule, they're willing to make that trade off because the incentives for them are just

lined up in a different direction. And yeah, the example of CD Projekt Red is particularly, I think, illuminating because they had committed to not crunch during production leading up to release. They actually publicly had committed to not do that, not just that they hadn't been, but that they would not. And then it came out that, you know, they actually were going to need to and or quote unquote need to and that people were crunching in the lead up to release. And so I think that's just a perfect example of like, they will do and say whatever the hell they want to make sure that the bottom line is being served first and foremost. To me, they're probably happy to make news as both being the

good guys for committing to not having people crunch and like, good, they get brownie points, they make the press rounds for a week. And then six weeks later, you know, they're the bad guys in the press, but they still get attention and people are still looking up the game and people are still watching the trailer because of it. And they understand, like they understand that just getting the press is good. And I think that's a part of it for sure. And I also think some of the decision making really, to me, it kind of mirrors a pretty common dynamic we sometimes see in anti-union retaliation when a campaign goes public. There's a really common kind of thought process for a lot of companies where you'd kind of have to be crazy not to retaliail an organizing campaign because they're much happier to be taken to court or, you know, be charged by the National Labor Relations Board pay some kind of fine or restitution. But in the meantime, you've gutted the campaign and maybe taken someone out of the workplace who was really essential to the campaign or maybe even just, you know, scared people in the process into giving up a little bit. And they will make that financial incentive. It's just a business decision to be an asshole that's in their financial interest and they're happy to break the law. And I think there's like a similar dynamic here where, you know, even though they're being really horrific to people,

it's in their financial interest to do so. They understand that the quote unquote bad attention and the bad press is worth it because they know where the numbers are going to be once cyberpunk releases. Folks are going to be really happy at the top of that company. It's just a similar kind of mental calculation. And I think both of those examples really articulate why it's so essential to organize for me. And it's not just essential for good conditions, you know, to the points we're talking about. But again, for the stability of our industry, these short-term financial decisions are just disastrous. And it's not an exceptional thing. Every company functions

this way. Every management functions this way. Every C-suite functions this way. And every group of shareholders think similarly. And so one of the things I really want to articulate about this is, again, I don't think any of us see terrible management like this and corporate decision making as evil. Again, it's not even a moral question. It's just they're following a basic pattern of logic and people need to understand it as a systemic problem, not an individual problem or, oh, you know, rock star, they're like really bad or, you know, whatever. It is a systemic problem that we're facing and that requires systemic solutions and the systemic solution is organizing.

You know, what you described there with what the workers are experiencing, it just resonates with what I've heard from workers in other industries that are being mistreated, misclassified, treated as contractors have little ability to push back against their employers. So I think that's really important to recognize, even though it might take different forms in different industries. We've talked a lot about the negative aspects of this, but there's also a very positive story here because these workers are organizing, are demanding their rights, are demanding improvements to their workplaces. I was wondering, can you give us an idea of how that organizing in the video games industry and the formation of unions is progressing in the United States, but also around the world where we have seen, you know, video game unions put together in the past few years? Yeah, absolutely. And I also want to just be really clear, like, you know, we've been talking about some pretty downer things the last few minutes, but to me, actually, organizing is so much more than just reacting to all the bad things in the world or all the

bad things our companies might be doing. For me, and I think for anyone who's truly, meaningfully engaging with proper organizing, it's about so much more, and it's about so much more a positive, optimistic worldview. It's so much more about wanting to create a better culture and community and supportive relationships between our coworkers and facilitate better communication and learning from one another. And that's kind of regardless of our bosses. It's kind of regardless of what our individual circumstances are. It's more just about us as workers building a stronger and stronger community. And I think the weakest organizing campaigns center only around all the scary, bad, negative things that are happening. And the strongest campaigns are the ones that focus on that positive, generative, creative aspect of organizing

that centers the worker's agency and not just us being dependent on the boss and reacting to every little thing they choose to do. There's something very powerful about that. So I just want to note that. Yeah, I think I would just say, like, you know, before you get into talking about, you know, the successes of the organizing and unions, you know, you gave a talk at XOXO last year that I watched in preparation for this interview. And you talked a lot about kind of the care and empathy that is at the core of the organizing. You know, that really resonated with me. But I think that would resonate with a lot of people who really care about, you know, how workers are being treated and the power of workers and kind of building a better world for working people, really,

not just what's most profitable for these massive corporations. Absolutely. And, you know, to take it kind of more into, you know, what does this look like in practice? You know, I think the greatest organizers are never the kind of pro-union, activist-y, leftist-y type people. Even though, bless their heart, they tend to be the ones who, you know, are kind of doggedly, you know, fighting for things. The greatest organizers are always just normal folks who work at our companies and who really care about their co-workers and are just very passionate about that and have a very positive, optimistic worldview. And maybe don't even have that bigger, broader kind of political economy analysis that maybe

we're kind of starting to dive into a little bit more. And I think, you know, the most meaningful organizing conversations are one where you really connect emotionally with your coworker on the issues they're facing, the things they care about, what motivates them. Why did you join this industry? Are we living up to that dream that you had in your heart, right? When you joined, crying with people in organizing, I think is a sign of good organizing in that like you're really being vulnerable and truthful with each other. And I think that shows a profound amount of strength, both in the nature of the organizing and in those individual people.

And so, yeah, I can't hammer home that point of good organizing not being, I think I said this in the video that you're referencing, but it's a good line. A lot of people think of organizing as waving a flag and storming the barricades, but it is so not that. It is talking to your co-worker at two in the morning because they're having a panic attack and they could really use someone right now. Just last night, we have this campaign that's ramping up to going public at a studio. And, you know, that brings about all kinds of stresses and personal conflict and every little problem and contradiction gets amplified when people are kind of ramping up for something so emotional and intense and meaningful in their lives. And until one in the morning,

I was on the phone with folks, you know, talking through really emotional, personal things, both in and outside of work, because that's why we organize. And it's that human emotional stuff that drives us to organize and that deeper empathy and care that you're talking about is everything. And I think so long as one centers that empathy and care, it's really, really, really hard to go wrong in organizing. I want to emphasize that and I can't underline it enough. No, I think that's really essential. And it seems like the complete opposite of just the culture that is really endemic to capitalism in the kind of greedy, kind of dog-eat-dog, making-profit kind of world versus the really caring and empathetic work of organizing and of being focused on the needs of your fellow

workers and fellow citizens. And so we got into this conversation, but before that, you were going to give us an overview of, you know, kind of the successes that have been made with the organizing that you've been doing and that many other people have been doing. So do you want to give us an idea of how that looks in the United States, but also around the world as well? Yeah, absolutely. And I think the best examples of this are built on exactly what we were just talking about, you know, that empathy, that love, that compassion for one another, you know, positive worldview, not just reacting negatively to things.

So I think there's a direct connection in that way. In the United States, I think we kind of lag behind the rest of the world, frankly, in terms of our level of organization and commitment to the process. But it, you know, it is happening. It fits and starts. It happens in little ways people never see. It happens in ways that folks will see in the coming future. At least us, you know, organizing with the Communication Workers of America on the Code CWA campaign. I mean, I'm looking at my calendar right now, and it is profoundly full. And that is profoundly full because so many goddamn people want to really manifest that vision that you and I are kind of talking about. And that world we're talking about where it is more empathetic, workers do have a voice. There

is a real sense of community and collective decision-making and professionalism. We just endlessly have people reaching out, wanting to organize. We're working with folks and have worked with folks everywhere ranging from outsourcing firms to small indie studios to worker co-ops to AAA game studios and everything in between. A lot of that is under the radar as most organizing is because most organizing isn't flashy and things that are really, I guess, of a public nature. But there is a lot going on. Some time ago, we had the riot walkout that I think was really a flashpoint within the U.S. industry in particular, you know, major studio. And you see hundreds of workers standing up against an exploitative company policy around

forced arbitration, which particularly targets marginalized people and folks who've like experienced toxic culture or abuse or harassment at the company and kind of forces them into silence in many ways. And, you know, fighting back on that, they were able to really dramatically change the company in a major way because of their organizing. And that was a really interesting moment. You know, you saw thousands and thousands of game developers and players, you know, pouring out messages of support that day, I remember, on Twitter and on forums and all over the place. And I mean, to me, that just really indicated that there is such sentiment for it. There's a lot of support for people doing exactly this.

But sometimes it's really scary and it just it takes time for people to really enact it and take it up themselves. But it is really essential that every single person do it because good organizing is a democratic effort. And it's only as good as every single person is engaged and active in it. And I'm getting off on another tangent, but, you know, the Riot Walkout was great. You know, some of the stuff around ArenaNet, you know, some time ago, and some workers there who are facing, I think, pretty terrible treatment and misalignment by management in one of the biggest games in its genre. supreme exploitation at that workplace. They were well under, you know, 50% away from the industry standard pay for like work. And it was a wildly unprofessional circumstance. And they started organizing, they reached out to us, you know, we worked with them to get every single

writer connected to talk to each other, you know, build community and social ties. And eventually once they, you know, asked management for social ties. And eventually, once they asked management for the improvements that they wanted, improvements that were necessary, because many of them were struggling to buy food and pay for rent and really basic things that every human deserves to be able to do. They made those demands. Company refused to acknowledge the seriousness of it and changed the conditions and issues that they were highlighting. And so the workers went on strike. And those video game workers led a three-week strike that ultimately, after a lot of twists and turns and many that weren't even public information, they won it. They won their strike and they found a settlement with management. And on average, the writers walked away with a 78% pay increase in their pay per word rate, which is kind of absurd. You know, I've actually never heard of any strike winning anything so drastic as a 78% pay increase. But I think a lot of that is really attributed to, first off, pretty much every single one of them

being from some marginalized background or an intersection of different marginalized backgrounds. They were very loving, very tough people, people who were fighting by the end, not for themselves, but for each other in true solidarity. There were people at that workplace who didn't want to work at the company anymore, but refused to give up on the strike, refused to walk away from their co-workers. They didn't even want to stay at the company because they were just so done with it. And yet for their co-workers, they stayed and they fought and together they won. Ultimately, I think this shows such a massive shift. This is another one of those moments, I think, where you're seeing folks, especially in a part of the industry, no one ever talks about,

you know, the press rarely covers studios like this and workers like this. And they led the first successful game worker strike in the history of the industry, as Asia as well. There's national unions spun up in a number of countries now. There's actual game workers organized in everywhere from Sweden to France to South Korea to China, any number of places. I mean, there's just such a flourishing, you know, it's still a long ways away, but there's a real shift happening. And I think even getting these tiny one by one little successes means everything because those 21 video game writers who went on strike and won, first off, everyone who saw that suddenly has a different frame of reference for what it means to organize in games, because holy shit, they actually went and did that. They went on strike and they won and they weren't like immediately demolished. Powerful. I mean, that just totally changes even how I see organizing the industry. And we had a massive flood of workers reaching out right after that, which isn't terribly surprising. But also for

those workers themselves, as they continue their careers and as they move from company to company, they will carry with them that knowledge. They will carry with them the working class consciousness and solidarity that they built back at Voltage. And that will continue to spread like company to company as people move around. And I think the exact same thing is going to happen in the tech industry in the United States, where we've now organized a few places, you know, in CWA, our brothers and sisters and siblings in labor over at OPEIU have organized Kickstarter. And as a lot of these workers continue to move from company to company, as is the trend in the industry, it'll only become more and more common for people to notice folks who worked with a union behind their back at a tech company. And that's going to be only more and

more normalizing and enable even deeper and deeper industry-wide organizing, not just one-off cases. So even though, you know, ultimately there's kind of small fits and starts, successes and changes here, I think they're very deep and meaningful. And I'm very, very excited to see the future of where this is all going. Yeah, I think that's a super exciting and hopeful story. And I'm sure it inspired a lot of other people to show them what can actually be achieved if they organize and push back, right? And I think you've done a really good job of outlining not just how the games industry is organizing and trying to take on these kind of endemic issues. The workers are trying to take on these endemic issues, but that much of this also extends into the wider tech industry.

You know, you've often related those points about the games industry right back to the broader tech industry. And that's really important, especially I know with your work with the communications workers of America. And so I wanted to end by asking you about the future. You know, obviously, we are seeing this progress, we are seeing these great examples of organizing and of unionization, even if, you know, it's not on a really mass scale so far. So as you look forward, you know, acknowledging that these are very uncertain times with this pandemic, what do you hope is the future for workers in these industries? And what do you hope that they will be able to achieve moving forward? Yeah, that's a great question.

And it really is the most important question. Before I get into the more granular and maybe more relevant answer, I want to zoom out a little bit. Every single day, pretty much every single hour of the day, I'm thinking zoom out a little bit. Every single day, pretty much every single hour of the day, I'm thinking about this. And this is what I think about. The political economy of the post-industrial workforce in the United States and other major countries is moving in a direction that is, in my opinion, not reversible. And the numbers bear it out in the ways in which industries are shifting and

changing, bear it out. You were citing gig workers and things for Lyft and Uber earlier. This is deeply interwoven with organizing and tech. And the political economy of the post-industrial workforce is really creating one major trend. The workforce is bifurcating, it is splitting into two main categories of workers. On the one hand, you have highly trained, highly educated intellectual workers, technological workers, and the workers who kind of help with the reproduction of those skill sets, you know, healthcare, education, so on and so forth. And then on the other side, increasingly, and it will only continue to increase so long as we have the current economic format and system that we do, is mass unemployment,

instability, service work, gig work, and a complete gutting of traditional industry over time. And this is something that's been happening for 60 years. This is something that's been ramping up in the last couple of decades in particular, and I think is really very noticeable now. And frankly, it's a dynamic that's been existing since the modern industrial era, because the nature of industry is such that it will always seek to automate workers out of existence. It will always seek to make more profit by making workers expendable because we're the most expensive part of industry. You know, we take healthcare and education and housing and food and go figure bosses don't like to have to pay for all of those very good normal human things. And so my point is like, increasingly,

these two camps are going to become even more concentrated in the way in which they're composed. You know, the more and more the tech industry automates away the work of everyone else in the way in which they're composed. The more and more the tech industry automates away the work of everyone else in the working class, the more and more people will be thrown into poverty, into mass unemployment, into service and gig work and unstable conditions. And also similarly, that tech realm of organizing and working is going to shrink because they will have less and less people in that industry. And I think you see that in many ways, actually currently in some certain trends in the industry, there will be less and less of them. And so there's kind of two main things that I think are really on my mind

when I cover this, which is that like, one, that is an existential threat to the working class as we currently exist, because the labor movement is not in tech. The labor movement is not yet firmly rooted there, and the workers are not firmly organized yet. And the more and more industry gets automated away and taken away from people, that's just the rug being pulled out from under the most organized, most democratic features in society, and that's workers in our unions. And the other thing is, we have leverage as working people through just sheer numbers. But more importantly, the thing we have to consider is economic leverage, and who has structural power. You know, we map out structural power in a workplace all the time when we organize, you know, if these workers went on strike, it would, you know, shut down the entire production process. But if these workers went on strike, maybe, you know, it's an inconvenience to management, but it's not a drastic problem, right? The have profoundly more structural power because in their small little

industry, they're going to impact every other aspect of essentially modern society, culture, production, and industry. And on the other side, even though there's going to be huge swaths of people in unemployment and service and gig work and so on, they won't have a lot of economic leverage. Ultimately, it is a problem for them to go on strike. And the companies who benefit from those workers' labor will, of course, be impacted, but it's not a societal wide impact, right? So I think it's just really important to understand this trend that we're facing as a working class. And as someone who's very, very focused on ensuring that the working class has power,

to me, organizing a tech is not just a niche thing that's important to do because everyone deserves a union. To me, it is an existential question for, can the working class provide for its own? Can it wield its power for those who are less fortunate and being impacted by the tech industry? I mean, a great example of this in practice is a number of Communication Workers of America members have lost their jobs because the tech industry has automated them away or made them insignificant or changed the production process out from under them.

And of course, in some ways that's okay because we should continue, of course, to innovate and make things more effective and reduce the need for labor. But under capitalism, of course, that just means people being sent into mass unemployment, whereas it could just be a liberatory thing. And now those people can just lead other lives where they're not maintaining whatever technological infrastructure that they were before. And so there's a direct connection between the essence of needing to organize in tech and the stability of pretty much every other worker

in the entire workforce across the entire society. So that's where my mind is, which is maybe a bit zoomed out and a little bit more off the point. But I think it completely relates because so many of the people I know who are organizing right now and building that future that you're asking about, the future of organizing in tech, the future of organizing in games, I think a lot of them see

that too. They see the necessity of doing this and the fact that organizing isn't just to get yourself ahead or anything like that. It's to better our communities. It's to better our society, to ensure that our labor is being used for good and not for bad, to reference Alphabet, you know, to do no evil, even though the company is now very much interested in doing evil if it makes a profit. So I just can't emphasize enough that organizing goes far beyond just improving wages and conditions and kind of bread and butter issues like that. So to actually answer your question, I think we have a really bright future in front of us. I think increasingly people are going to become much more accustomed to organizing. And like I mentioned, I think that will continue to spread from company to company. I also expect there'll be pushback from corporations, both on the individual level,

when a particular workforce organizes. But also, at some point, there will be an industry-wide pushback, and you will see the employers binding themselves together to push back even harder. I mean, all you have to do is study the steelworker organizing and the mine worker organizing and the timber organizing, and pretty much every form of organizing from the 30s and 40s to know exactly what these companies are going to do. Because, yeah, sorry, I'm going back into the history and political economy section. But for a long time, everyone thought organizing in steel was impossible. It was new forms of employment. Management was using different forms of structuring the workforce, different forms of pay,

highly trained, highly experienced people, hard to replace. The workers themselves saw themselves as treated far above the typical conditions of the working class. And the companies were these massive, massive industrial monopolies. Sounds a whole hell of a lot like the tech industry right now. And yet the steel workers organized because, you know, people put serious resources into it and did the damn thing and proved every wrong. And after the fact, you know, the steel workers organizing felt inevitable, but it felt impossible before they ever did it. And I think we're in the same situation here with tech, massive monopolies, you know, the workers themselves and people

looking at the workers don't really think that they can organize and there's no real reason to do so. You know, the consciousness isn't there. The ways in which working is structured is so difficult, too difficult for organizing, you know, people working from home, people working on teams that are spread across London and Milan and San Francisco. And yet it is possible. And not only is it possible, it's essential that we organize in tech. And so, you know, it feels impossible now, but I think we're going to look back and see it as inevitable in the future. That's the work in front of us right now. We have to make the impossible feel possible and make something that seems really big and scary, small and personal, and something that every single person in the industry can and should be doing. And many of them are. And that if you're listening

and you're in the tech industry, or if you're in games or really in any industry and you're unorganized, it is time for you to step up with your coworkers and reach out to people who are experienced, who are knowledgeable about these issues and can help you through the process of organizing so that you do it in a safe, effective, professional, positive way that builds that brighter future I think we all want to see. That's the future that I'm looking at. That's the future that every worker organizer that I work with on a daily basis, that's the future they have in their mind too. So that's the work going forward. I think those are such important and sobering points to end on. You outline not only the importance of needing to organize in tech and beyond, but also how it is absolutely essential to

push back on these trends now so they don't get to a point where they're almost insurpassable for us to push back on. And also to make sure that we need to change these larger economic structures so they work for the working class. Emma, I really appreciate the work that you do in organizing these workers and trying to bring attention to these really important issues. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. Yeah, of course. And thank you so much for having me on. I do want to say I don't organize workers, though. I train them, I teach them, I guide them, but I don't organize workers. Workers organize themselves and they fight because they know that it's in their interest, in their collective interest, in the community's interest.

Workers organize themselves. You know, it's a semantical thing. And I know it's a little silly to say, but I think it's really essential that we wrap our heads around the significance of those semantics. Emma Kinema is a campaign lead with the Communications Workers of America on the campaign to organize digital employees. She's also a co-founder of Game Workers Unite. And you can find more information on those in the show notes. You can also follow Emma on Twitter at Emma Kinema. You can follow me at Paris Marks.

And you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you want to support the work that I put into making this show, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. And as always, thanks for listening. Thank you.