Swedish game companies hope to break new ground with joint union deal
Two of Sweden's largest game companies, Massive Entertainment and Sharkmob, want to join together with other companies in the gaming industry to create a specialised collective bargaining agreement.
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"We're taking this seriously and see it as the start of an important journey," Massive's CEO Thomas Andrén told the TT newswire. Massive is home to around 700 employees.
The gaming industry is one of the fastest-growing industries in Sweden, but there is still no industry-specific collective bargaining agreement in place for employees. To put that into context, the vast majority of employees in Sweden ‒ over 90 percent of the workforce ‒ are covered by an agreement.
According to Andrén, employees and unions have been asking for an agreement for some time.
"We've been talking to the unions for years and what we're seeing now is a result of those discussions. The collective bargaining agreements which are already out there don't really fit us, and that's why we can see a need for a tailor-made agreement for our industry," he said, adding that a collective bargaining agreement would also make employers more attractive.
"Our industry is hyperglobalised where we're competing alongside studios all over the world," he said.
"That's why its important for us to be attractive employers. It's also about validating us as an industry. The gaming industry must be the biggest cultural export we have in Sweden today. We hire an unbelievable number of people and we need to live up to that."
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At the beginning of the year, Andrén, along with a number of other game developers, created a working group to put together a proposal for a collective bargaining agreement. Now there are around ten Swedish developers in the group, discussing their needs alongside local and regional unions.
"It's going to be really exciting to see the result and of course, we hope we can put an agreement together," he said.
Sharkmob in Malmö is one of the game developers in the working group, which sees clear advantages to putting together a special agreement for the gaming industry.
"We're not purely media, we're not purely technology and we don't fit into industry," Sharkmob's CEO Fredrik Rundqvist said. "We need to find something which can satisfy the specific group of professional people who you need to make a game."
He added that the company's employees are already in favour of the initiative.
"A lot of them are union members. That doesn't mean that they have a collective bargaining agreement. Many of them want one and we understand that, but that also means we need to put together one specifically for our industry."
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