As they say, when it rains, it pours – and for Ubisoft, their latest hurricane has come down in the form of a French labor union general ‘call-to-strike’ being made to all of their employees located within the European republic.
Said strike call was issued by Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (Eng: The Syndicate of Video Game Workers And Laborers), an independent video game industry union “created to defend the moral and economical interests of workers”, on September 26th in response to the decision by company management to “impose a return to offices for 3 days per week for all employees.”
“This announcement was made without any tangible justification or any consultation with the workers’ representatives,” wrote the STJV in their official rallying announcement. “After more than five years of working efficiently in the current remote-work context, many of our colleagues have built or rebuilt their lives (family life, housing, parenthood, etc.) and simply cannot return to the previous working conditions. Our employer knows this perfectly well. The consequence of its decision will be the loss of our colleagues’ jobs, the disorganization of many game projects, and the drastic increase in psychosocial risks for those who remain.”
“This decision is announced immediately after the failure of the profit-sharing negotiations,” the union continued. “Exactly like previous salary negociations: management’s proposals were innaceptable [sic], the negociations’ timetable was appalling, and management was deaf to the proposals of the various Employee representatives.”
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To this end, the STJV then declared, “To express our anger, we call all Ubisoft employees in France to a first strike on October 15, 16 and 17.”
This strike, the union explained, would seek Ubisoft’s fulfillment of three specific employee demands:
- “A formal agreement on remote work: with a due process of real negotiation between management and unions. Not an arbitrary decision taken several months in advance. One which guarantees that each person can freely choose its number of remote days and when they are in the week, as well as beeing counted by the month and not by the week.”
- “An immediate increase in all salaries to compensate for the drop in our living standards in recent years. The restoration of the profit-sharing at a 60% objective. The end of the gender pay gap and a higher increase in low salaries.”
- “Actually listening to employees opinions by the implementation of a “social dialogue” worthy of the name. Management seems indeed to confuse monologue with dialogue.”
Closing out their statement with a reminder that all French citizens are granted a constitutional right to strike, the STJV ultimately concluded, “Until proven otherwise, games only exist thanks to the workers’ labour, and good games thanks to good working conditions. We invite our colleagues of all countries to mobilize as well.”
At present, Ubisoft has yet to offer any public response to the STJV’s strike call.
As noted above, this looming labor dispute is but the latest in a rash of the developer’s own self-inflicted wounds.
Between their admission that Star Wars Outlaws sold terribly, decision to delay Assassin’s Creed Shadows (and that’s not even mentioning its surrounding discourse), and investors’ threatening of a proxy battle, recent weeks have seen Ubisoft hit with one PR disaster after another, all thanks to their clearly out-of-touch leadership.
Whether or not the company decides to actually bandage and treat these wounds rather than just ignore them and press on remains anyone’s guess – and honestly, at this point, it could genuinely go either way.
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