Are unions actually growing? | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

The workers of IGN this week announced plans to unionize, with 87% of eligible employees having already signed union authorization cards.

It's the latest example of the unionization trend that's sweeping the US. Or is it?

STAT | 6% - The percentage of private sector workers in the US who were members of a union in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a figure that has steadily declined from 16.8% in 1983, the earliest year for which the BLS has such statistics.

Well, at least people are more pro-union these days for sure.

STAT | 57% - The portion of respondents in GDC's 2024 State of the Game Industry survey who supported unionization.

STAT | 56% - The portion of respondents in the IGDA's 2014 Developer Satisfaction Survey who supported unionization.

There's a little bit of apples and oranges there in that the IGDA specifically asked about forming national unions of game developers while the GDC question was just about whether they thought workers in games should unionize. And even within the GDC's annual polls, the number bounces around within a few percentage points each year.

But it sure does seem like unions are growing these days, doesn't it?

Part of that is no doubt a matter of perspective, because we're seeing things from the view of the games industry, where we've gone from zero unions in the US to a scattering of outfits representing developers in Zenimax, Activision Blizzard, Sega, and a number of other operations. The number of people represented by those unions still isn't massive, but it's a start.

Another part is likely that the gaming media is also increasingly unionized, with IGN joining the staff of Polygon and Kotaku (and the many outlets their parent companies own) in unionizing. Media