Keywords Studios’ quality assurance (QA) team in Edmonton, Canada, unanimously agreed to form a union. The Alberta Labor Board confirmed all 16 members of the team voted in favor of the union.
Keywords Studios provides contracted services to various game studios in many areas such as game development, art design, sound services, and localization. The company has offices in more than 20 countries. The Keywords Studios QA team in Edmonton, Canada, worked with BioWare. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is one of the most famous games on which the team is known to work.
According to Polygon, the unionization process started after Keywords Studios office arrangements. Associated with the company’s “return-to-office” decisions, employees faced commuting costs of hundreds of dollars—employees who objected to this situation sought to establish a union to seek their rights. Employees who claim that they are already working for low wages demanded that their right to work remotely not be taken away.
A QA employee and organizing committee member told Polygon:
“We’re super happy. It will assist us going forward into bargaining that the whole team is completely united on this effort. We all got together and started talking about what it would look like in terms of costs for each of us individually,” James said. “We had a choice. We can either try to quit and go find another job, but we love what we do. We don’t want to leave. So we decided to try to form a union to see if we can drive some positive change in our workplace.”
The Raven Studios QA team announced that they have officially established a similar union recently. This union also holds the title of being one of the largest game industry unions in the USA. Some feel that the Raven Studios events will positively impact industry unionization and promote employee rights. However, there is no information that the Keywords Studios team made such an attempt by taking Raven as an example.
