Labor

Following Rockstar’s firing of more than 30 developers last year in a move accused of being “union busting”, developers at the studio have formed the Rockstar Game Workers Union. According to Game Developer:

The new deal, still being voted on, ensures enormous bonuses for memory chip workers but much smaller payouts for everyone else. Two Samsung unions take issue with that: one says its members will vote against the deal, the other says it’s taking legal action after being denied the chance to vote.

The New York Times and Reuters report that a memo was sent to Meta employees on Monday reassigning 7,000 of them, and said that “As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles ⁠into their new org structures.”

All 42 “regular part-time and full-time employees” of the studio, behind games like Psychonauts and Kiln, will be part of the union, Aftermath reports.

Here’s what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said about the decision:

That’s the question nine senators and members of Congress have asked in the wake of its decision to close Maryland’s Towson Town Center store. It was the first store to unionize, in 2022, but union staff say they’re not being allowed to transfer to other stores, while non-union employees can.

Japan Airlines will start trialling Unitree robots for moving luggage and cargo in May, with the experiment running until 2028. The airline is also planning to use the robots for cleaning aircraft cabins and eventually hopes to deploy them permenantly to help cope amid Japan’s labor shortage and rising tourism.

The job cuts could affect around 10 percent of Meta’s workforce, or around 8,000 employees, according to Reuters. This is reportedly the first of two waves of layoffs planned for this year, and follows an earlier report from Reuters that suggests Meta could cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce.

Iron Galaxy Studios, which has also helped support and port dozens of games, including BioShock Infinite, Diablo III, and The Last of Us Part I, is cutting around 90 employees, according to Kotaku.

The stores are all located in struggling shopping malls. Employees at the non-union shops can transfer to nearby stores, but union workers from Towson, Maryland can apply for open roles. Apple says this is due to their collective bargain agreement, which the union disputes, threatening legal action.

The first-of-its-kind rest stop, which includes e-bike battery recharging equipment, was erected in record time thanks to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s request to get it done in time for his first 100 days in office. Workers had to improvise a crane-lift because they didn’t have the right permit, and also deal with a misplaced electrical wire. But in the end, they finished it. (Hopefully future shelters will include bathrooms, though.)

The cloud giant has started notifying workers of the cuts, which are in the “thousands,” sources tell CNBC. Oracle reported employing 162,000 people as of May 2025, and has plans to raise between $45 and $50 billion this year for its AI infrastructure buildout.

The Information reports that the job cuts will affect “a few hundred” employees across the company, including in its Reality Labs division, which experienced a round of layoffs in January as Meta pulls back on the metaverse. The layoffs also reportedly impact workers on its social media, recruiting, and sales teams.

Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.

The contract, which will cover more than 70 workers, includes things like guaranteed wage increases, restrictions on mandatory “crunch time,” and “enhanced regulations around the usage of AI and generative AI in the workplace,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) says in a press release.

The previously-rumored cuts follow an accidental calendar invite sent last night. They come after 14,000 corporate jobs were cut in October, attributed partially to advances in AI. This latest round of layoffs is less than 5 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate workforce.

A survey of 5,000 white collar workers suggests experiences differ greatly between CEOs and non-management employees. Forty percent of workers say it saves them no time each week to use AI and just two percent say it saves them more than 12 hours. Meanwhile, two percent of executives say they don’t save any time, and 19 percent say it saves them more than 12 hours a week.

The GTA VI studio now claims that firing dozens of employees last week for “gross misconduct” was because they were “found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum.”

Sources tell Reuters and Bloomberg that the job cuts could start on Tuesday, potentially impacting almost 10 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees across logistics, gaming, payments, and cloud computing teams.

Unionized employees are striking for a codified four-day work week and more money for the lowest paid employees, Kickstarter United announced. Importantly, the union isn’t asking for a boycott of the crowdfunding platform — instead, they’re asking creators to complain about issues they run into, use the union logo in projects, and to send letters of support to management.

As Mark Gurman noted in a tweet, the lawsuit claims the management of an Apple Store in Reston, VA, “failed to accommodate an employee’s Jewish faith and subsequently fired him because of his religion and in retaliation for complaining of religion-based discrimination.”

Engadget and The Register note that Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman has announced layoffs affecting 30 percent of its workforce, after telling employees in May that “...AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too.”

The story and franchise development team at Activision Blizzard will join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 9510. This is the second union coming out of Blizzard this year after the Overwatch team voted for unionization in May. The department focuses on creating cinematics, animation, and narrative content, as well as being the place that houses franchise historians.

Workers at Raven Software have finally secured their first union contract winning for its members guaranteed wage increases, protection against mandatory overtime known as crunch, and more. The win comes three years after quality assurance workers at the Call of Duty support studio organized the Game Workers Alliance in collaboration with the Communications Workers of America.