The rise of the video game union

polygon.com:

The Rise of the Video Game Union is an all-in-one explainer on why game workers are unionizing and the specific steps that future organizers may take. We encourage you to share the link, and we’ve also prepared a zine version that you can print and distribute in your community. In legal speak, the zine is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US), which permits distribution of the zine provided that it is not altered or modified, or used commercially. Learn how to print it in your town.

Atari workers in California tried to unionize in 1984 — an attempt struck down by anti-union sentiment and by an internal hope that the games industry would be different, that the young field would eventually mend itself.

Hope didn’t work.

For decades, studios across the industry and the globe, studios both big and small, have pushed their workers to the limit through low pay, brutal crunch, and discrimination. At first, we only heard about these injustices in whispers. Workers had little leverage, and employers wielded creative careers as a cudgel, saying that game developers should feel lucky to be able to do what they love.

But in the past decade, workers across all industries have rekindled that spark of collective action, fighting back against poor working conditions with lawsuits, resignations, and stories told in the press. They’ve made inroads. On the occasion that a company had to publicly reckon with its actions — be it sexism, racism, discrimination, exploitation, or some other mixture of misbehavior and cruelty — bosses would vow to do better. In recent years, some promises have even become realities, as some of the industry’s worst