Employees at Nacon-owned Spiders studio, which is producing the Greedfall 2 movie, have written an open letter “to their employer” detailing their grievances over several years and called for a strike in response to “management’s continued refusal” to take their concerns seriously. 44 of Spiders’ 95 employees signed the document, made public by French union Stjv, in the hope that it will “finally push management to act in the best interests of employees and the company.”
This document addresses several years of known problems, which have greatly intensified in the last year with the arrival of the current leader of the company: instability, opposition to anticipating problems and securing working conditions, overall mismanagement, turnover and recruitment problems, unacceptable delays in achieving equality and gender parity, significant lack of transparency, denial of problems, refusal to recognize worker representation and blocked negotiations.
The open letter is the second that disgruntled Spiders employees have written, following a previous document and a related strike on January 19. “Since then,” the workers in question write, “new negotiations have begun over wages and working conditions at the studio have continued to deteriorate.”
The document itself is 20 pages long and outlines the issues, ending with a list of demands “to secure our lives, careers, and the company in the short and long term.” Issues listed include “a blatant lack of transparency on all aspects of the company,” “a difficult production cycle for Greedfall 2,” and “management’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge collective action.”
Their demands focus on greater transparency and better representation of workers, an end to “authoritarian and inefficient centralization of power,” greater freedom to work from home, salary increases comparable to those at other Nacon studios, and “the immediate rectification of any salary discrimination against women and non-binary people.”
The document also features several cartoons featuring characters from the Spiders games.
“Faced with management's continued refusal to discuss, take the issues raised seriously, and act to correct them,” Spiders employees are calling for a strike to take place next week, starting September 2. “We will be organizing pickets on September 2 and 3 in front of the company's offices and online on a Minecraft server created for the occasion.”
We've had some positive news on the labor front recently. Just this week last month, workers at Bethesda Game Studios and World of Warcraft formed unanimous unions. Solidarity, Spiders.