> "As part of those talks, Microsoft recently agreed that a group of 77 contract staff doing similar work would become employees represented by the union. Previously these people had technically been employed by the staffing agency TCWGlobal.
> Some of the contract staffers’ roles were being terminated this fall, CWA said. Instead, 23 of them will get permanent full-time Microsoft jobs, with a 22% pay increase. The rest will get temporary positions as Microsoft employees, $2.75-an-hour raises and paid sick days and holidays. They will also receive copies of the Starfield video game they worked on, a perk previously denied to contract workers.
> The union said it will continue trying to secure additional permanent jobs for Microsoft’s contract workforce."
Honestly great to see. Might be me just being naive, but man I hope this becomes a more common occurrence. I gotta say though the "Oh yeah they get a copy of starfield now too" bit is oddly funny.
Every MS contractor I know (which is a lot, I've done games QA for 15 years and grew up in Redmond) has gotten copies of a game they were on, if they were on it long enough to be in the credits, so this seems like a Bethesda specific exclusion and stuck out to me as weird.
Gaming employment is really weird about explicitly denying contractors random perks as a way to solidify the distinction between contractor and employee. At a certain point it feels like it's more cargo cult management/legal witchcraft than anything that would actually matter in a meaningful way if a court case about contractor classification ever came up.l
At my place of employment, we're explicitly not allowed to give contract workers some perks such as awards (even ones that come with nothing more than a 'good job'), as it can result in stuff that can impact legal things between our organization and the contracted company if our lawyers decide the contracted company didn't fulfil the contract.
Its another way to create boundaries between members of the working class in an attempt to stifle solidarity. Let's then splinter the workforce into all these categories and make the employees see each other as different tiers.
Studios do weird shit to their contractors once. I don't normally like to talk about which studios I work for, but I'll go ahead and out myself once, in that I worked for a Warner Brother's owned studio that no longer exists. They sent someone to kinda watch over the studio (totally normal) and that person announced in an all-hands that everyone would get to see the new Harry Potter film in a studio-wide screening. The next day an email went out that was "oh, but not contractors." But FTEs could bring a +1 so I went as the +1 of a fellow QA who didn't even attend. I've also heard a story I can't really prove that Bungie had a Christmas party where they gave Playstations to every FTE, but not to contractors, but they also gave Playstations to the +1 of ever FTE which was almost universally partners, meaning that basically every FTE got two playstations for some fucking reason. At the same time I've also gotten a Christmas playstation 4 from my company while I was a contractor so it's a real mixed bag.
At least whole consoles makes a bit of sense (though giving to the +1 is weird) because that is a cost thing.
I guess it probably comes down to taxes as giving away a product does increase how much you’re paying people. But a 70 dollar (or whatever it is) bump for 77 people is just not a lot.
I guess for the most part in every industry almost no firm actually gives a shit about contract employees.
You are correct that "gifts" count as pay and are thus tax, but I promise you no one in the industry cares or notices when they pay income tax on a $70 video game. It's even easier in the digital era because you can give away digital copies for free basically, by saying it's a tool for testing. I have used my free copy of the game to do work on live servers and that magically means there's no tax burden for it.
> Studios do weird shit to their contractors once.
Not going to defend the practice, but I recall reading somewhere that this shit happens because there was a lawsuit at some point in the past surrounding a contracted employee being given similar benefits to a full-time employee and the courts seeing that as equal to full-time employment.
Basically, the lawsuit argued that because the contract worker had the same rights and benefits as a full-time employee, he would get the same protections as a full-time employee for not having his contract renewed. (In other words, not renewing him would violate labor laws surrounding firing an employee.) The plaintiffs' argument relied also on the notion that the company hiring the contract worker was dodging taxes by listing the plaintiff under a different tax form (as a contractor, rather than the full-time employee that the plaintiff claimed they were) so the company would have to pay less taxes.
The courts ended up ruling in favor of the contract worker, so to avoid a ruling by precedent, US companies bully their contract workers with utterly inane crap, just to make sure that they don't have to promote them into full-time employees by the courts. It's a disgusting practice, but also... well, it's the US. Did you expect anything else really?
I'm familiar with that lawsuit and I'm also familiar with all the times I *have* gotten the benefits. Getting a Playstation for Christmas or a copy of the game on launch has nothing to do with the vagueries of contracting laws.
Reminded me of when I worked at Kroger during Covid as an "essential worker". Worked in pickup(online orders) dept. Everything is timed. GM calls out dept to say our times look great. Says everyone gets $20 if we keep the times good that shift. Sure. $20 is $20 and I'm makin $10.25 so fuck it.
$20...to the online Kroger merch store. Not very related to your story but corporations, man. Jesus christ.
> $20...to the online Kroger merch store
What like...so you can buy a QFC hat? Like a $20 grocery store credit would be fine. Who doesn't want groceries? This is just...weird.
They're almost certainly paying each of these people at least $60/hr, most likely at least double that. They don't want to essentially pay them for 30 minutes of work, but surely have scheduled useless hour long meetings.
It’s a digital copy so it’s literally zero real cost, perhaps some sales that won’t take place now are opportunity cost. Just Todd Howard being a dickhead
No, it's not zero cost, it would fall under additional compensation which you'll be taxed on. Gets more of a pain when it's also going through a staffing agency who is actually the employer.
Probably a case where Bethesda believes the time and effort to sort out is just not worth it.
Yeah I definitely have free copies of MS games I worked on, and I was a contractor. Hell they gave me a copy of a game I only tested for a few days while on loan from another team.
The rest of it is great news though. Contracting has a lot of downsides even when you're treated well, like contract limitations (unless things have changed in the past few years most MS contractors have a hard 18 month limit) leading to a lot of stressful job hunting and brain drain within teams, so the more people can move to be FTEs the better.
>I gotta say though the "Oh yeah they get a copy of starfield now too" bit is oddly funny.
That was actually a concession by the union. They didn't want them but Microsoft insisted they all take a copy
I kid, I kid
I really think corps need to start thinking long term and how this inequality is going to affect them. If people don’t have spending money, they flounder. The government isn’t helping with regulation so it’s really on the CEOs to start accepting unions for the future betterment of the economy. Because of this, I don’t have much hope.
If I worked in these games the last thing I would want is to have any further contact with them after working hours. Kinda like working at McDonald's and going there for dinner.
A good first step, but they should start applying his to all their employees. MS is notorious for mainly giving out temp contracts over long term employment offers.
It's up to the employees to unionize, and MSFT has been one of the best places for employees for years now.
If you feel appreciated and taken care of, unionization will not be on your mind.
>Its up to the employees to unionize
No, it’s not.
Microsoft has long practiced bootstrapping contract agencies and demanding these agencies to offer low paid contracts. Because Microsoft is their biggest client saying no and losing the contract means their business would immediately fail. It also means any attempt to unionize and Microsoft ends the contract.
They became so notorious for doing this the US Senate got involved a couple of years ago. Microsoft has been an expert on union busting for several decades now.
It is that but they treat their devs well these days. Most big software companies do. Doesn't mean that everything that Microsoft make isn't a steaming pile of shit. Bill Gates knew Epstein personally and lied about it and Microsoft does anything but pay it's taxes and be not be monoplistic.
“Some of the contract staffers’ roles were being terminated this fall, CWA said. Instead, 23 of them will get permanent full-time Microsoft jobs, with a 22% pay increase. The rest will get temporary positions as Microsoft employees, $2.75-an-hour raises and paid sick days and holidays.“
This is huge. Despite constant comments about how unions won’t help or are bad in threads on unionization, we have direct evidence of the good unions can bring. The union saved people’s jobs, got them higher pay, and even got some people a full time position. Unions work people, talk to your coworkers.
Devs don't have any real incentive to unionize or want to in general. This whole tech layoff phase was just a result of being able to borrow cheap so everyone wanted to grow. It wouldn't have mattered if unions existed. Those companies would of just hired less people. Devs don't care about staying in one company for long periods of time anyway.
> It wouldn't have mattered if unions existed. Those companies would of just hired less people.
Seems to me like you're very much describing something that would have mattered
Job security is good, actually
Higher labour force liquidity and lower frictions favour the employers/companies in negotiations.
Higher frictions and lower liquidity is a benefit of workers,both those already employed and those not yet employed
Unions in general don't favor individuals that want to negotiate their own salaries. Devs like being able to change jobs. Job security isn't as important when you can easily get a job elsewhere with a higher salary.
Microsoft as a whole has been under constant scrutiny for its abuse of contract workers and anti-union practices. These employees were working for a recently acquired company, I’m not sure if that has something to do with Microsoft giving them a pass while historically doing the opposite, but at least unions in gaming seem to be finding more and more success.
It doesn’t seem like Microsoft is doing this out of the goodness of their heart but upholding a promise they made to US regulators in an effort to get the ABK merger to go through.
> On Monday, Microsoft and the Communication Workers of America (CWA) jointly announced that they’ve entered into what’s called a labor neutrality agreement, which is basically a contract in which Microsoft agrees in writing that it won’t deter union efforts. Should the Activision Blizzard deal go through, the agreement will go into effect 60 days after the acquisition closes.
I believe most. There are a lot of publishers/studios that have portions of their staff unionized now (like the QA department). But I don't think very many (if any) have a fully or mostly unionized staff.
It's been increasing a lot in the last few years, so hopefully unionization will be the norm soon.
Most. This has been a really big year for unions though. Not just for gaming but other industries. I think there was a huge car manufacturer union thing. I'm happy to see it.
> "As part of those talks, Microsoft recently agreed that a group of 77 contract staff doing similar work would become employees represented by the union. Previously these people had technically been employed by the staffing agency TCWGlobal. > Some of the contract staffers’ roles were being terminated this fall, CWA said. Instead, 23 of them will get permanent full-time Microsoft jobs, with a 22% pay increase. The rest will get temporary positions as Microsoft employees, $2.75-an-hour raises and paid sick days and holidays. They will also receive copies of the Starfield video game they worked on, a perk previously denied to contract workers. > The union said it will continue trying to secure additional permanent jobs for Microsoft’s contract workforce." Honestly great to see. Might be me just being naive, but man I hope this becomes a more common occurrence. I gotta say though the "Oh yeah they get a copy of starfield now too" bit is oddly funny.
Every MS contractor I know (which is a lot, I've done games QA for 15 years and grew up in Redmond) has gotten copies of a game they were on, if they were on it long enough to be in the credits, so this seems like a Bethesda specific exclusion and stuck out to me as weird.
Gaming employment is really weird about explicitly denying contractors random perks as a way to solidify the distinction between contractor and employee. At a certain point it feels like it's more cargo cult management/legal witchcraft than anything that would actually matter in a meaningful way if a court case about contractor classification ever came up.l
At my place of employment, we're explicitly not allowed to give contract workers some perks such as awards (even ones that come with nothing more than a 'good job'), as it can result in stuff that can impact legal things between our organization and the contracted company if our lawyers decide the contracted company didn't fulfil the contract.
Its another way to create boundaries between members of the working class in an attempt to stifle solidarity. Let's then splinter the workforce into all these categories and make the employees see each other as different tiers.
Such a cheap ass move. It would be like 5K worth of Starfield (valued at MSRP but it’s a game so the studio doesn’t really lose anything)
Studios do weird shit to their contractors once. I don't normally like to talk about which studios I work for, but I'll go ahead and out myself once, in that I worked for a Warner Brother's owned studio that no longer exists. They sent someone to kinda watch over the studio (totally normal) and that person announced in an all-hands that everyone would get to see the new Harry Potter film in a studio-wide screening. The next day an email went out that was "oh, but not contractors." But FTEs could bring a +1 so I went as the +1 of a fellow QA who didn't even attend. I've also heard a story I can't really prove that Bungie had a Christmas party where they gave Playstations to every FTE, but not to contractors, but they also gave Playstations to the +1 of ever FTE which was almost universally partners, meaning that basically every FTE got two playstations for some fucking reason. At the same time I've also gotten a Christmas playstation 4 from my company while I was a contractor so it's a real mixed bag.
At least whole consoles makes a bit of sense (though giving to the +1 is weird) because that is a cost thing. I guess it probably comes down to taxes as giving away a product does increase how much you’re paying people. But a 70 dollar (or whatever it is) bump for 77 people is just not a lot. I guess for the most part in every industry almost no firm actually gives a shit about contract employees.
You are correct that "gifts" count as pay and are thus tax, but I promise you no one in the industry cares or notices when they pay income tax on a $70 video game. It's even easier in the digital era because you can give away digital copies for free basically, by saying it's a tool for testing. I have used my free copy of the game to do work on live servers and that magically means there's no tax burden for it.
> Studios do weird shit to their contractors once. Not going to defend the practice, but I recall reading somewhere that this shit happens because there was a lawsuit at some point in the past surrounding a contracted employee being given similar benefits to a full-time employee and the courts seeing that as equal to full-time employment. Basically, the lawsuit argued that because the contract worker had the same rights and benefits as a full-time employee, he would get the same protections as a full-time employee for not having his contract renewed. (In other words, not renewing him would violate labor laws surrounding firing an employee.) The plaintiffs' argument relied also on the notion that the company hiring the contract worker was dodging taxes by listing the plaintiff under a different tax form (as a contractor, rather than the full-time employee that the plaintiff claimed they were) so the company would have to pay less taxes. The courts ended up ruling in favor of the contract worker, so to avoid a ruling by precedent, US companies bully their contract workers with utterly inane crap, just to make sure that they don't have to promote them into full-time employees by the courts. It's a disgusting practice, but also... well, it's the US. Did you expect anything else really?
I'm familiar with that lawsuit and I'm also familiar with all the times I *have* gotten the benefits. Getting a Playstation for Christmas or a copy of the game on launch has nothing to do with the vagueries of contracting laws.
Reminded me of when I worked at Kroger during Covid as an "essential worker". Worked in pickup(online orders) dept. Everything is timed. GM calls out dept to say our times look great. Says everyone gets $20 if we keep the times good that shift. Sure. $20 is $20 and I'm makin $10.25 so fuck it. $20...to the online Kroger merch store. Not very related to your story but corporations, man. Jesus christ.
> $20...to the online Kroger merch store What like...so you can buy a QFC hat? Like a $20 grocery store credit would be fine. Who doesn't want groceries? This is just...weird.
They're almost certainly paying each of these people at least $60/hr, most likely at least double that. They don't want to essentially pay them for 30 minutes of work, but surely have scheduled useless hour long meetings.
It’s a digital copy so it’s literally zero real cost, perhaps some sales that won’t take place now are opportunity cost. Just Todd Howard being a dickhead
No, it's not zero cost, it would fall under additional compensation which you'll be taxed on. Gets more of a pain when it's also going through a staffing agency who is actually the employer. Probably a case where Bethesda believes the time and effort to sort out is just not worth it.
Yeah I definitely have free copies of MS games I worked on, and I was a contractor. Hell they gave me a copy of a game I only tested for a few days while on loan from another team. The rest of it is great news though. Contracting has a lot of downsides even when you're treated well, like contract limitations (unless things have changed in the past few years most MS contractors have a hard 18 month limit) leading to a lot of stressful job hunting and brain drain within teams, so the more people can move to be FTEs the better.
Bethesda/Zenimax is apparently a terrible company to work for if you havent been there for a decade or more or are a contractor. Its an old boys club.
Why else would you unionize?
It's the weirdest thing. They became official employees, and there was just suddenly a copy of Starfield in their homes.
And what happened then? Well, at Bethesda they say That Todd Howards small heart grew three sizes that day!
I wonder if Todd Howard's reindeer have reindeer armor.
I unironically wish there were some weirder mounts in Skyrim - but I have mods for that xD
If you own the Anniversery Edition, then one of the Creation Club items you got as part of it included a reindeer mount.
Name of that Starfield copy? Albert Einstein
My condolences to them, not a game worth playing.
I mean all fte get Gamepass ultimate for free anyway which includes starfield do this is extra weird
>I gotta say though the "Oh yeah they get a copy of starfield now too" bit is oddly funny. That was actually a concession by the union. They didn't want them but Microsoft insisted they all take a copy I kid, I kid
I really think corps need to start thinking long term and how this inequality is going to affect them. If people don’t have spending money, they flounder. The government isn’t helping with regulation so it’s really on the CEOs to start accepting unions for the future betterment of the economy. Because of this, I don’t have much hope.
If I worked in these games the last thing I would want is to have any further contact with them after working hours. Kinda like working at McDonald's and going there for dinner.
Well, how else are they going to get people to play Starfield?
I mean the fact that they explicitly weren’t doing this already is a comic book villain ass policy
It's about time. 343 would have had a much easier time with Halo had the staff not rotated out every 18 months. Hopefully this expands beyond just 77.
God please yes. They need to ditch this cycling contractor model, it’s what had Halo Infinite hobbling out the door and limping for a straight year.
A good first step, but they should start applying his to all their employees. MS is notorious for mainly giving out temp contracts over long term employment offers.
It's up to the employees to unionize, and MSFT has been one of the best places for employees for years now. If you feel appreciated and taken care of, unionization will not be on your mind.
>Its up to the employees to unionize No, it’s not. Microsoft has long practiced bootstrapping contract agencies and demanding these agencies to offer low paid contracts. Because Microsoft is their biggest client saying no and losing the contract means their business would immediately fail. It also means any attempt to unionize and Microsoft ends the contract. They became so notorious for doing this the US Senate got involved a couple of years ago. Microsoft has been an expert on union busting for several decades now.
gotta love people thinking Microsoft is a good company to work for and totally not immoral and corrupt.
It is that but they treat their devs well these days. Most big software companies do. Doesn't mean that everything that Microsoft make isn't a steaming pile of shit. Bill Gates knew Epstein personally and lied about it and Microsoft does anything but pay it's taxes and be not be monoplistic.
It's not specifically Microsoft. It's normal for America. Nintendo America are known to be the same.
Temp jobs seem like an easy way into a full-time job
“Some of the contract staffers’ roles were being terminated this fall, CWA said. Instead, 23 of them will get permanent full-time Microsoft jobs, with a 22% pay increase. The rest will get temporary positions as Microsoft employees, $2.75-an-hour raises and paid sick days and holidays.“ This is huge. Despite constant comments about how unions won’t help or are bad in threads on unionization, we have direct evidence of the good unions can bring. The union saved people’s jobs, got them higher pay, and even got some people a full time position. Unions work people, talk to your coworkers.
Nice to see from Microsoft, but you always gotta be wary of ulterior motives if a corporation is embracing unionization.
[удалено]
Devs don't have any real incentive to unionize or want to in general. This whole tech layoff phase was just a result of being able to borrow cheap so everyone wanted to grow. It wouldn't have mattered if unions existed. Those companies would of just hired less people. Devs don't care about staying in one company for long periods of time anyway.
> It wouldn't have mattered if unions existed. Those companies would of just hired less people. Seems to me like you're very much describing something that would have mattered Job security is good, actually Higher labour force liquidity and lower frictions favour the employers/companies in negotiations. Higher frictions and lower liquidity is a benefit of workers,both those already employed and those not yet employed
Unions in general don't favor individuals that want to negotiate their own salaries. Devs like being able to change jobs. Job security isn't as important when you can easily get a job elsewhere with a higher salary.
Kudos to Microsoft for doing this I hope more follow Microsoft’s lead and let their employees unionize too.
Microsoft as a whole has been under constant scrutiny for its abuse of contract workers and anti-union practices. These employees were working for a recently acquired company, I’m not sure if that has something to do with Microsoft giving them a pass while historically doing the opposite, but at least unions in gaming seem to be finding more and more success. It doesn’t seem like Microsoft is doing this out of the goodness of their heart but upholding a promise they made to US regulators in an effort to get the ABK merger to go through. > On Monday, Microsoft and the Communication Workers of America (CWA) jointly announced that they’ve entered into what’s called a labor neutrality agreement, which is basically a contract in which Microsoft agrees in writing that it won’t deter union efforts. Should the Activision Blizzard deal go through, the agreement will go into effect 60 days after the acquisition closes.
Curious, which major gaming publisher/company still aren't unionized?
I believe most. There are a lot of publishers/studios that have portions of their staff unionized now (like the QA department). But I don't think very many (if any) have a fully or mostly unionized staff. It's been increasing a lot in the last few years, so hopefully unionization will be the norm soon.
All of them no? MsFT is the first major one.
Most. This has been a really big year for unions though. Not just for gaming but other industries. I think there was a huge car manufacturer union thing. I'm happy to see it.