// KOTAKU — GAMING
Xbox Unions In The Dark Despite Negotiating Layoff Protections For Months: ‘We Understand That Businesses Have To Business, But The Uncertainty Is Maddening’
After multiple reports suggesting mass layoffs at Xbox are imminent, many employees are bracing for the worst any day now. But among those Xbox studios that have already unionized, preparation for such an event looks a little different. Instead of just waiting for the bad news to arrive through an email or meeting invite, union members are preparing to fight back.
In recent years, Xbox Game Studios has steadily filled up with various unions represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). They include everything from Raven Software QA testers and wall-to-wall unions across various game teams at Blizzard to developers at Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, and Double Fine. Most of those unions are still bargaining over their first contract. The union at Double Fine, a studio Microsoft is reportedly trying to cut loose, hasn’t even been formally recognized yet.
But the unions for ZeniMax QA testers, Raven Software, and Blizzard Albany have secured collective bargaining agreements and those contracts stipulate how Xbox must conduct any layoffs it wants to do, including how much severance it has to provide to the affected workers. For those without contracts, Xbox must negotiate with each union individually over the impacts of proposed layoffs. After years of bargaining, these groups are quite clear on what they want, and they intend to fight for it, not as a bunch of small, separate teams, but as a unified group.
I spoke with Zenimax senior encounter designer Morgan Goin and Blizzard senior editor Alison Veneto following a CWA press conference yesterday where union workers from across Xbox spoke openly about the current reports and rumors of major cuts. Goin and Veneto tell me that the various Xbox unions have been sharing notes and working together for some time now as they all push toward contracts. Sometimes that looks like borrowing language Xbox already agreed to in one contract to speed along another. Sometimes, it means a bigger union with more leverage fights harder for conditions that a smaller union might not be able to win, potentially opening the door for other contracts to include them.
For instance, they tell me that Xbox was quite stubborn on “recall rights”—which require the company to rehire laid-off workers if their same positions reopen within a certain period of time— for its QA unions. But the larger developer unions think they can move the company on that sticking point.
“But one of the big asks across Xbox Studios, is transferring people into open roles at other studios. They have all of these studios, you know, the roles are similar on various games. If you have the skill set, [why can’t you] just apply at another studio or even apply at your own studio? Can we just move people into the open positions?”
For now, none of these unions have even been officially contacted by Microsoft about the reported layoffs. Goin tells me that during last year’s Zenimax cuts, the union was told only roughly an hour before the public announcement was made, and they expect something similar will happen the next time around as well. The Zenimax union at least has tried to get more clarity from the company about what’s going on: in a planned bargaining table session following the reports, union representatives asked the company representatives if they could tell them what was going on. The company lawyer claimed to know nothing about it, and the others in the room (HR, other lawyers, and studio leadership) offered nothing further on the subject.
So, lacking clear information from the company, union leadership is preparing for layoff negotiations anyway. According to Veneto, the World of Warcraft union had already shared a layoff proposal in bargaining a few weeks ago and Microsoft had rejected it. But then, after the recent layoff reports, “CWA really started to talk to them more, even just through the weekend to try to push that along because we did have language that was in active negotiation to see if we c