WASHINGTON—The dice have rolled in favor of worker organization. The Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) creative team has gone union, with the Communications Workers, despite opposition from their employer, the electronic and board game giant Hasbro and its Wizards of the Coast subsidiary.
The 100 workers are the latest group of employees to enlist with CODE-CWA, the union’s ongoing organizing drive in the video game industry and related enterprises. This group’s affiliation with CODE-CWA won by an 83%-17% margin in a National Labor Relations Board-run vote, CWA said.
After unveiling the organizing drive earlier this year, the workers already had a card-check majority. The Dungeons & Dragons creators, organized as the United Wizards of the West Coast Union, approached the Hasbro-named bosses for voluntary recognition, but the bosses refused.
Instead, the bosses declared in letters to the workers there would be more “flexibility” in direct employer-employee relations than would occur under a “rigid” union contract.
That idea didn’t fly, especially since until now the Dungeons & Dragons creators, who have been productively teleworking from home for years, have all been ordered to move to the Seattle area, site of Hasbro’s headquarters, within two years.
That was just one issue that prompted the Dungeons & Dragons workers to start thinking union. Others are layoff protections, controls on mandatory “crunch time”—overtime—better working conditions and control over the use of artificial intelligence in creating their games and other products.
They also are contending over company demands for corporate “ownership of creative materials,” even those the workers develop on their own time.
The new unit would also include one other group of creators: Game designers, artists, producers, engineers, and others who work on the digital card collecting game Magic: The Gathering Arena.
Corporate use, and the corporate threat, of AI, to replace workers has been a common recent worry for the entire labor movement, not just CWA. The parent union has worked out an agreement with Microsoft about company neutrality and joint training in how AI can help workers adjust to the new environment and its looming sea change.
Other AI developers, principally in Silicon Valley, have resisted unionization or working for mutual benefit with their employees on AI, its potential and its problems.
“Over time, communication [with management] has broken down a bit,” digital product manager Rogue Kessler told an industry publication, Aftermath. “We’ve started to get defensive attitudes from leadership, much more ‘It’s our way or the highway.’ That’s what pushed a lot of us into union organizing, because we don’t have another viable mechanism for redress.”
“We’ve gone where the talent is, looked beyond the immediate Seattle area to find the best and the brightest to make this game,” senior software engineer Valentine Powell told the publication. “All of a sudden, you’re not allowed to be remote anymore. The circumstances under which you were hired are being changed out from under you.”
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