Labor

The National Labor Relations Board announced yesterday it’s processed 2,594 union formation petitions over the last year. Business Insider reported that’s a 58 percent increase from fiscal year 2021 when the NLRB saw 1,638 such requests.

“Microsoft remains steadfast in our support of our current and future employees in whatever choice they make about their workplace and their representatives,” Microsoft’s Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. Under the agreement, “Microsoft will take a neutral approach when employees covered by the agreement express interest in joining a union,” according to the CWA.

Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has become the latest tech giant to conduct layoffs, eliminating 1,258 positions in its San Diego and Santa Clara offices, roughly 2.5 percent of its global workforce.

Talks between SAG-AFTRA and the studios to end the union’s ongoing strike were derailed on Wednesday evening. One area of contention was the actor’s union request for viewership bonuses.

Deadline reported that DreamWorks Animation made the cuts because of business downturn, increased costs, and the strikes that went on for much of this year.

Game Developer reported Friday that Employees of the Polish games studio CD Projekt Red (CDPR) have formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU) under the nationwide union OZZ IP due to the studio’s layoffs earlier this year.

The contractors were laid off from Keywords Studios, reports Polygon. The staffers voted to unionize in June 2022.

Visual effects workers at Disney voted 13-0 to form a union with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) on Tuesday.

Eurogamer and VG247 report a Team17 spokesperson confirms CEO Michael Pattison, who joined the company two years ago after leaving PlayStation, is out. In 2022, Team17 was one of the companies that announced plans for an NFT project, before backtracking.

The plant’s 2,500 future workers are now pawns in ongoing UAW talks, despite Ford not explicitly saying so:

Bloomberg reports that annual increases for Apple’s retail employees, including AppleCare technical support, will be about 4 percent this year, down from eight to 10 percent last year. Bloomberg cites labor shortages, inflation, and unionization efforts as factors in last year’s higher increases. Guess things are back to normal?

After nearly a week of indie developers tearing down Unity’s new pricing policy that was set to take effect on January 1st, the company now says, “We have heard you.” Unity’s pricing scheme that was set to take effect in 2024 would have established a convoluted setup charging game makers for downloads and installations.

Nicole Carpenter at Polygon has an excellent report on workers in a Corsair warehouse in Duluth, Georgia, and their efforts to organize. In addition to Scuf, Corsair also owns Elgato and recently acquired Drop.

CEO Jim Farley and executive chairman Bill Ford both showed up to the negotiating table with UAW earlier this week in an effort to avert a strike, the company said in a statement. (UAW President Shawn Fain was a no-show, Ford says.) Ford wants to be seen as pulling out all the stops. But it’s also true that Ford employs the most UAW members of all the “Big Three” automakers, leaving the company uniquely exposed to the economic fallout from a strike.

In yet another sign that the workers behind some of Hollywood’s biggest movies are ready to fight to be paid what they’re owed, Marvel Studios’ VFX artists have unanimously voted in favor of forming a union under the IATSE.

Director Tim Burton told The Independent two days ago that Beetlejuice 2 was only a “day and a half” away from completion when Hollywood actors went on strike.

In an 8-K filing with the SEC, Warner Bros. Discovery says it’s lowering its earnings expectations by about $300 to $500 million amidst the writers and actors strike. The company now anticipates earning anywhere from $10.5 to $11 billion for 2023:

SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether or not to authorize a strike against the gaming industry, the guild says, as negotiations with major companies have reached a “stalemate” over issues like pay, safety, and the “unrestrained use” of AI (via Deadline).