A union isn't a detriment to a company.

The best thing we can do for our studios is to keep the talented people who make our games amazing.

And we do that by having the agency and power of a strong union. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have two fantastic guests for you.

Taylor Welling is a producer and union member at OneBGS, which is the new union at Bethesda Game Studios, and Catherine Frieson is a quest designer for World of Warcraft and a member of the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild. Over the past couple of years, a growing number of workers in the video games industry have been forming unions. Often, that is,

quality assurance workers, though not always. But in July, there was some really notable news

when workers at Bethesda Game Studios and in the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard both

formed wall-to-wall union. So it wasn't just, say, one role that was in this union, for example, quality assurance

workers. It was actually many different roles at the studio, recognizing that everyone is part of

making these games and should be part of this collective decision making and this negotiation

that is happening with employers. And so that stood out for me for a number of reasons.

One, because it set a fantastic precedent to see more video game workers forming unions and, of course, many different roles being able to do so.

But also because these are both studios that are underneath Microsoft, which recently, you know, over the past few years, has been on this binge of acquiring

studios, especially really big ones, like Xenomax Studios, which owns Bethesda or Activision

Blizzard, which World of Warcraft is, of course, a part of, but many other major video game

franchises. And there have also been some questions recently about some of the

decisions that the Xbox team, the gaming team within Microsoft has been making. And across the

wider industry, we have seen a lot of layoffs. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to speak

to workers at these unions to learn about what was motivating them to unionize, but also what they

think about these broader trends that they're seeing in the industry that they work in.

And in particular, I wanted to ask them about a neutrality agreement between Microsoft and the communication workers of America, which has been helping many of these video game unions to get formed, that essentially said Microsoft would be neutral if its workers in these various video game

companies wanted to unionize in exchange for the communication workers of America saying it was

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