Union organizers from the games industry met with President Biden

The fight to unionize the games industry made it all the way to the White House on Thursday. That’s where Alex Speidel, one of the lead organizers from the United Paizo Workers met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and secretary of labor Marty Walsh inside the Oval Office. A photo on President’s Twitter account . confirmed the meeting.

Present in the Oval Office with Speidel were members of Titmouse Productions (The Legend of Vox Machina), who are organized under the IATSE. Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls was also there. The most high-profile labor leader on hand for the event, Smalls was asked to testify before the Senate Budget Committee by its chairman, Senator Bernie Sanders.

“This is not a left or right thing,” said Smalls, speaking about the right to unionize without illegal interference from management. “This is a working-class issue, and it’s the workers at the bottom that make these corporations go.”

Sanders took the opportunity to slam what he called Amazon’s union-busting activity. He stated that “Amazon did everything legal and illegal to defeat the efforts of union organizing.”

While workers at Amazon distribution centers around the country have had a difficult time organizing their workplaces, workers at Paizo had much smoother sailing on their way to voluntary recognition — that is, to being formally recognized as a collective bargaining unit by Paizo management. According to Speidel, the final push was made with the help of a contingent of freelance writers who simply stopped accepting new work.

According to a news release issued by the Paizo Workers, Speidel shared with President Biden how those freelancers “began to refuse assignments from the company in solidarity with the workers’ request for voluntary recognition of their union.” That collective action, Speidel said, was key in bolstering the full-time workers’ position.

“It was a privilege to be able to talk about the campaign of the CWA to organize tech and game workers and to also share the amazing work done by United Paizo Workers as well as our freelance writers,” Speidel stated in the news release. I hope the administration will continue to support workers organizing for unions in all sectors and that this momentum can be taken back to CWA so that they can carry the CODE–CWA campaign forward. Every worker deserves a union!”

CODE-CWA was spun up in 2020 with the help of Emma Kinema, co-founder of Game Workers Unite, a grassroots organization working to unionize the video game industry. Ironically, it’s the workers at a company best known for its pen-and-paper role-playing games like Pathfinder and Starfinder who helped lead the way. Other unionization initiatives have also been initiated at Raven Software, part of Activision Blizzard, and Keywords Studios. Keywords Studios works closely with BioWare as well as other publishers and developers to offer quality assurance (QA).