Over a Half of Game Developers Support Unionization
This is driven by several factors including low pay, excessive work hours, and workplace discrimination.
Labor organization UNI Global Union released a new report providing the results of a survey, according to which, over a half of game developers claim they are underpaid.
The majority of respondents expressed their interest in unionization citing low pay as one of the major factors that drive this desire – 66% of interviewed developers noted that they have this problem at their companies. Among developers in Europe, this rate is even higher – it reaches 77%.
Developers also named some other thorny issues related to their workplace including excessive work hours (43%), inadequate benefits (43%), and workplace discrimination and/or sexual harassment (35%).
UNI Global Union reports that underpayment has especially become a significant issue at mobile studios and localization firms – 73% of developers at mobile firms and 94% of workers at localization companies identified low pay as an issue.
Although only 35% of the interviewed developers noted that discrimination and/or harassment was an issue, among female and non-binary respondents this rank is much higher. Almost half (46%) of female developers and 43% of non-binary developers said that their workplace has a gender discrimination problem. And at AAA companies, this percentage is higher – more than half of women (59%) and nearly half of the non-binary developers (47%) said that gender discrimination is a problem in their workplaces.
Only 17% of respondents stated that they came across racial discrimination at their workplace, however, non-white participants were more likely to do so with 28% claiming this as an issue.
These and other issues have apparently driven the developers' interest in unionization with 79% of respondents expressing support or strong support for unionizing their workplace. 15% of developers stated that they neither support nor oppose the unionization and only 6% stated that they are against it.
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