Twenty-one employees at 2K Video games’ Petaluma, California, movement seize studio filed for a union election on Tuesday, the Worldwide Alliance of Theatrical Stage Staff introduced Wednesday in a information launch. The group is trying to the Nationwide Labor Relations Board to schedule an election after 2K administration failed to answer a request for voluntary recognition.
Employees on the studio, which is known as 2K Mocap, have shaped the primary public union marketing campaign at a devoted movement seize studio. They’re trying to handle points with working situations and pay. “The unit’s priorities embody job safety, pay fairness that displays trade requirements, wage minimums for brand spanking new hires, and a clearer definition of job tasks,” IATSE wrote in a information launch. “The employees argue that regardless of latest investments in upgrading the ability, their wages stay beneath par, making it troublesome to keep up long-term careers within the trade.”
The union, if licensed, would cowl animators, artists, audio specialists, carpenters, stage technicians, and engineers. These employees do movement seize for franchises like NBA 2K, Mafia, BioShock, WWE 2K, and others. Online game movement seize actors are sometimes represented by the Display screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Tv and Radio Artists. (Online game actors, together with movement seize actors, are at the moment on strike, largely over synthetic intelligence protections.) The individuals who work at 2K Mocap aren’t actors; they do the remainder of the work that surrounds the actors: constructing units, animating fashions, capturing movement and audio, and ensuring all these little movement seize balls keep on the movement seize fits.
“As inventive professionals, we tend to sacrifice and accept much less, as a result of we now have an unrelenting ardour for what we do and the tasks we work on,” 2K Mocap movement seize instruments engineer Ryan Kwok mentioned in an announcement. “However we owe it to ourselves and to others on this trade to struggle for protections in order that we are able to preserve constructing the video games that we and so many others love.”
2K Video games has not responded to Polygon’s request for remark.
The proposed union is represented by IATSE, which is a world union that represents leisure employees who’re sometimes behind the scenes. Its focus has largely been the film and tv industries, however IATSE has lately expanded into the online game trade. In 2023, Workinman Interactive, which makes licensed video games like Spongebob’s Sport Frenzy and Fisher Worth: Good Cycle, unionized with IATSE.
