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“Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”
Staff at CD Projekt Red are uniting with others in the Polish video game industry to unionise.
The union was formed after CDPR announced a third wave of job cuts in as many months, driving developers to unionise as a means of “improving their workplace/industry standards in a way that has legal power and amplifies their voices”.
“We started talking about unionizing after the 2023 wave of layoffs when nine per cent of Reds (that is roughly 100 people) were let go,” the union explains on the Gamedevunion.pl website (as translated by Google Translate).
“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.
“The above shows how employers tend to view their interests to be in conflict with those of their employees,” the statement continues. “While employees are the ones creating value in this arrangement, they lack any decision power in company-structure-related matters. That is why we need to organise to enter those situations on equal footing.
“We believe that the mass lay-offs are a danger to the gamedev industry and we believe that unionising is a way for us to preserve the industry’s potential,” it concludes (thanks, TheGamer).
The union is part of the wider nationwide union, OZZ IP, and welcomes members from across the Polish gamedev industry to join its “support network” and “get a platform to exchange experiences and know-how with your peers”. It does not cover CDPR staff working in Vancouver, though, or those not on a Polish contract.
According to an interview with the founders of the movement, Lev Ki and Paweł Myszka, they “haven’t had any response” from CDPR management, but all the necessary legal documentation has been submitted, so the exec team is aware of the union.
The decision to unionise follows three sets of CDPR layoffs in the past three months. In May, 29 employees lost their jobs at CDPR-owned studio The Molasses Flood, which is currently working on a separate Witcher project codenamed “Sirius”. In June, CDPR let go of 30 employees who were part of the team working on Witcher card game spin-off Gwent as the studio scales back development on it, and in July, 100 people – about nine per cent of the studio’s entire headcount – were laid off.
