Context

Now over 50 years old, the video game industry is not a ‘young’ industry. However, it remains unstable, with antiquated working conditions, and is still underdeveloped, due to a lack of accumulated and advanced knowledge. The vast majority of video game bosses are clowns with over-inflated egos, only accepting totalitarian control and vainly trying to hide their incompetence by treating workers and consumers like stupid children.

The crisis the video game industry is currently going through is entirely due to these bosses but it’s the workers, the very people without whom games wouldn’t exist, who are losing their jobs. Just as capitalism allows.

Social crises and layoffs are multiplying, from Don’t Nod to Artisan Studios via Ubisoft, Leikir, Spiders, Goblinz… The list goes on and on, and the stories of workers in distress are multiplying.

In an initial article we identified three major categories of problem plaguing the industry:

Unacceptable working conditions, where discrimination thrives, preventing workers from being able to have a real, sustainable career.
Widespread disorganisation, in which an absence of strategic planning directly impacts workers’ health, job stability, and production quality.
Complete indifference, if not outright hostility, from companies on issues of work-related health and disability.

Since its creation in 2017, the STJV has taken numerous actions to support workers and improve the industry: legal, moral and financial support, worker representation in companies, data gathering, building relationships with political institutions and trade unions in France and around the world, etc.

While the STJV has succeeded in placing video games among the most unionised private industries in France, the fight is still ongoing.

This was the theme of our press conference on January the 16th, during which we presented the union’s orientations for the coming years. We have reproduced them in this article.

Informing workers

In the video games industry, as in many others, employers are methodically trying to deprive workers of knowledge about their own industry: everyday problems, our skills and trades, our rights, etc. The STJV proposes an action plan to train video games workers on a massive scale about the reality of their industry.

We want to :

Produce more data on the problems and working conditions in the video game industry in order to make them more objectively known.
Establish a credible reference framework of video game professions, by and for workers, with the aim of establishing clear job descriptions and fighting against the vagueness and even active disinformation about our skills and professions, which are damaging our careers and benefiting employers.
Create more public documentation on workers‘ rights and employers’ obligations, to combat employers’ abuses and train workers in the sector. Employers would also benefit from this learning a great deal themselves.
Draw up an assessment of self-employment (‘freelance’), which is becoming increasingly common in the video game industry, but whose status is little known and poorly documented. All too often it is a form of disguised salaried employment, depriving workers of the majority of state protection schemes, while directly exposing them to job insecurity.
Inform students who need to know both their specific rights, but also to be better trained in labour law and the specific situation of our industry as future video game workers.
Improve training for workers, in particular by enabling them to use the twelve paid days of economic, social, environmental and trade union training leave to which they are entitled each year in France.
Ensure that the voice, information and representation of workers are respected. Employee representative bodies are still not respected by employers, who block all attempts at change and improvement, leaving workers in the dark. We encourage these bodies to sue their companies whenever necessary and will commit the necessary means to help them do so.

Raising awareness among public authorities

For a long time, the video game industry was only represented by employers‘ lobbies, which kept the public authorities in the dark, allowing employers to shower themselves with public money while continuing to violate workers’ rights with total impunity. The STJV wants to put a definitive end to this situation by showing the true face of the industry to elected representatives, the CNC, the French labour inspection authority… and to any other institution concerned.

We want to :

Demonstrate the strategic value of the video game industry. Between advanced technologies that can be used in sensitive areas, the soft power that it represents, and the hegemony of foreign groups and capital within it, public authorities should take an interest in the sector.
Inform elected representatives and institutions about the state of working conditions and widespread non-compliance with the law in the video game industry, with job and career insecurity directly threatening French video game production and its international competitiveness in the short and medium term.
Inform elected representatives and institutions about the public subsidies used in the video game sector, how they are distributed, and how they are actually used. They must be able to measure the real value of this aid and the shortcomings of its current use, to enable them to better frame their political action.
Inform elected representatives and institutions about institutes in the public and private video game education system, many of which receive public funding. The hegemony of big private groups and their influence on studying conditions, where high prices, mediocre teaching standards, and the maintenance of a code of silence are just as much a threat to the industry.

Reorganising video game productions

Corporate disorganisation and lack of strategy, fuelled by the incompetence or malice of our bosses, are the main threats to workers’ health and jobs, as well as to the quality and diversity of productions. If these problems are not resolved, the very existence of the video games industry is threatened.

We will fight to :

Establish common principles of healthy and efficient production management that do not crush workers, while stabilising jobs, and leaving room for creativity, innovation and worker expression. This will result in quality games produced under good conditions.
Impose the most horizontal hierarchy possible in companies. Integrating workers directly into decision-making is a necessary measure for jobs and business survival. Workers have predicted every business failure or bankruptcy that has hit the industry in recent years. A dictatorial hierarchy refusing to listen to their solutions has prevented problems from being solved on time.
End the cult of the author and allow workers to choose what their work contributes to. This is a democratic measure, of cultural and economic salvation, to break the current vicious circle of standardisation in games. Games are the complex result of collaboration between workers with a wide range of skills, not of solitary creative ‘geniuses’ that don’t exist.

Making the fight international

Like many industries, the video game sector is part of an international context that has a direct impact on workers’ rights. Social dumping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dumping) is one example of the concrete impact it has on jobs and working conditions.

Taking an internationalist position, the STJV has made this an essential factor in its action since its creation, whether through the exchange of knowledge or support for foreign unions, including in their creation process. The development of global trade unionism in video games means that we can do even more, together.

Our ambition is to :

Set up joint actions with foreign unions, in a spirit of international solidarity to help video game workers organise everywhere, and to fight against companies putting workers in competition with each other, particularly through outsourcing.
Inform and raise the awareness of foreign unions and international institutions about the video game industry in order to get higher levels involved in legislation and eventually negotiate international agreements. This may include strengthening our presence within the Uni Global Union, of which the STJV has been a member for several years.

Creating and securing new rights

While we are still a long way from it on many issues, the video game industry’s outdated working conditions will not improve simply by complying with the legal minimum. Video game workers, like all workers, must be able to work in dignified conditions and to get the recognition they deserve, so they don’t waste their lives fighting to receive what they are due.

In addition to representing the industry before the institutions, we are going to use all the levers of action at our disposal to:

Obtain new rights for all of society, by getting the video game industry involved in inter-professional actions whether they be international, national or in branches close to the video game industry. The diversity of our industry means that we can play a liaison role between industries such as IT and animation.
Obtain new rights in companies, by negotiating company agreements with the aim of standardising these rights as far as possible across companies and workers in the industry.

We will first focus on the urgent issues in the video game industry:

Tracking and restructuring and reducing working hours, so that working life no longer devours life altogether, and to prevent companies abusing working hours as much as possible.
Disabilities, so that the video game industry finally becomes accessible to everyone, with positions adapted to each individual, and so that disabilities are acknowledged, including those that are widespread in the video game industry but that have little to recognition from the State.
Physical health, work-related illnesses and accidents, and ergonomics. The risks associated with office jobs, in particular musculoskeletal, neurological and visual disorders, must finally be taken into account. Solutions must be found so that workers can remain in good health beyond a few years of their career.
Psycho-social risks, such as depression, burnout and anxiety which wreak havoc among video game workers due to the disastrous working conditions, and which remain systematically ignored by companies.
Consumer violence to which video game workers are exposed, particularly in online marketing teams, and the consequences of which are almost universally ignored. The STJV would like to introduce the concept of operational protection, which exists in the civil service, into our industry.
Emergency protection measures for workers, in particular by stopping production when there is too much sick leave taken in a short time period, which is a sign of serious organisational malfunctioning endangering workers.
Workers’ compensation and in particular, in the form of contractual bonuses, the sharing of the value they produce when a game is a commercial success.

The general strike

We know from experience that our bosses, whatever the company and although they claim the opposite, do not listen when we ask them regularly to improve our working conditions and our careers. It is therefore necessary to make them understand in a different way that workers, their rights and their working conditions are not mere adjustment variables to make up for their incompetence.

Employers have colossal means at their disposal, because they use the value created by workers against them, with lawyers, crisis communication firms and trade union repression consultants – however, workers have numbers and the solidarity that binds them together.

To demand that the industry finally matures and becomes stable, that workers benefit from dignified working conditions, and that they can have confidence in the future, the STJV calls on all workers to take part in a general strike of the video game industry on February the 13th, 2025.

We will publish a detailed call for strike action tomorrow, Friday 17 January 2025.