Gamedevs’ Roundtable at Ver.di Formulates Demands for Fair Conditions in the Games Industry

Next to devcom, the game worker group Gamedevs’ Roundtable has held a press conference with six demands for better working conditions in the games industry. Apart from improved salaries, a collective agreement and contract standards, the group is asking for gender equality and an end to the penalisation and stigmatization of part-time work with the support of ver.di.

On a press conference at Youth Hostel Deutz near devcom, ver.di representatives and three volunteers from the games industry have published the demands as part of the group Gamedevs’ Roundtable at ver.di.

The group had for six months collected survey answers from all around the German games industry and filtered them into six demands now published. While ver.di is supporting the effort with its main organization structure, the Roundtable is entirely comprised of game devs and other workers from the industry.

The demands are as following: - Improved salaries to counter higher cost of living and because record profits should profit workers to a fair share - Collective Agreement (Tarifvertrag) to regulate working hours, vacation days and overtime conditions - Betterment of working hours: Overtime must be voluntary and crunch not mandatory, no penalization or stigmatization of part-time - Gender Equality and Harassment protection, change of company culture - Contract Standards: transparent contracts that support employees work-life balance - Transparency: about companies’ finances, projects and status in the form of regular, project-wide updates, be involved in decision-making process

The full list of demands with their reasoning behind the steps can be found on the ver.di website. The group also has a panel on devcom Tuesday bringing their ideas to a wider audience of devs, called „Democracy at Work“ at 16:00 o’clock on stage 5.

The group, spearheaded by three game devs, sees the problems that these demands want to solve as structural; only a collective solution can end them, they say. While the demand for stronger worker protections has been part of German games workers’ needs for several years, the current mass layoffs and the employer-driven job market, weakening the position of employees, has given the final spark for the collective to organize their demands.

While the internationality of games corporations may pose a challenge for the unionization efforts, the group says that Germany is a good place to start them because of the comparably strong worker’s laws and existing infrastructure of Worker’s Councils and such. Furthermore, international institutions do exist to them wide the focus and bring the efforts to other countries. Ver.di and its international associates are supporting the idea. On a 2022 Game Workers and Tech Workers Assembly in Berlin from international union network UNI Global Union, they saw the need for strong organization all across Europe. According to their own surveys, in Europe „around 80% of game workers would join a union of they knew how or of there were one for them“ says UNI Global Union representative Karri Lybeck. Ver.di is one of the affiliates of UNI.