Employees at Sega of America’s Irvine, California location have announced their intent to unionize under the Communication Workers of America. The union, Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega (AEGIS), comprises 144 employees across many departments at the Irvine location including QA, live service, marketing and others, making it the current largest multi-department video game union in the United States. AEGIS is among other growing video game unions including workers at Activision Blizzard (Raven Software and Blizzard Albany studios respectively).
Unions have been growing in popularity among game developers in recent years as workloads continue to increase and crunch is often used as a measure to meet deadlines put forth by companies. AEGIS stated:
“Our workers and our audience deserve games made by people who make a living wage. In our quest to reclaim our collective power, we have built bridges with fellow workers from across our company in an effort to understand our shared issues and those that are unique to each department.”
This news comes on the cusp of Sega Japan announcing it will raise its employees’ wages by 30% to keep up with the competition in the country among other companies such as Bandai Namco and Nintendo. Still, no type of wage hike was announced for Sega of America workers.
The goals of AEGIS include:
- Higher base pay for all
- Improved benefits
- Clear-defined outlines for advancements
- Balanced workloads and defined responsibilities
- Adequate staffing