Nintendo and staffing agency met with NLRB labor complaint

A worker has accused Nintendo and staffing agency Aston Carter of violating the National Labor Relations Act, according to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) docket published Monday. Axios first reported the complaint.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, workers are protected by law in their right to form a union and self-organize. The complaint, filed Monday in Washington, names both Nintendo and Aston Carter, a staffing agency Nintendo apparently uses to hire workers in contract positions. The unnamed worker alleges that Nintendo and Aston Carter engaged in “concerted activities,” like retaliation toward, firing, refusing to hire, or disciplining organizing workers; “coercive actions,” like surveillance of those workers; and “coercive statements,” such as threats or promises of benefits. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is meant to protect workers from unfair labor practices related to organization efforts.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday. Details included in these documents were not immediately available to the public — just the public docket. Nintendo has not responded to Polygon’s request for comment.

Nintendo of America, a Japanese subsidiary of Japanese Nintendo, is located in Redmond. Nintendo as a whole has 27 subsidiaries and more than 6,500 employees, according to a Corporate Responsibility report published in 2021. Nintendo, like other videogame companies, sometimes depends on contract labor to develop certain positions.

With this lawsuit, Nintendo of America is joining a growing list of video-game companies who have been accused of labor abuses. Currently, the NLRB is pursuing a labor dispute with Activision Blizzard’s leadership and its quality assurance (QA), workers at subsidiary Raven Software. Raven Software QA workers have announced that they will unionize. The employees are calling themselves Game Workers Alliance and are awaiting a procedural ruling from the NLRB before they can vote in a formal unionization.

Elsewhere at Activision Blizzard, hundreds of workers walked out of work in 2021 following a report from the Wall Street Journal that detailed the extent of Kotick’s knowledge of employee misconduct.

The latest NLRB lawsuit comes in a time when video game workers are pushing toward unionization. Last year, Beast Breaker developer Vodeo Games became the first certified gaming studio union in North America after management voluntarily recognized it. In 2020, contracted game writers for Voltage Entertainment went on strike, and won, after 21 days without official union recognition — a first for the video game industry. And in the board games industry, United Paizo Workers and Cards Against Humanity Workers United formed unions in 2021 and 2020, respectively.