Union membership numbers in the UK have risen significantly, following a tumultuous period in the video game industry (which still continues today).
The Game Workers branch of the IWGB union – which aims to “end the institutionalised practice of excessive/unpaid overtime” among other goals – told The Observer it saw its membership numbers increase by almost 50 percent between December 2022 and the end of last year. In October 2023 specifically, the union saw membership rise by 12 percent. This was soon after Fortnite developer Epic announced a wave of job cuts.
“It’s felt like a deluge of redundancies in the past five or six months. It just keeps coming and coming,” said Austin Kelmore, chair of the IWGB Game Workers branch. “And with this wave, I’ve seen people saying ‘we need to join unions’. Our membership went through the roof. We had the largest growth of new members in any month in our five-year history at the end of last year.”
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