Over 700 unionised Ubisoft staff working throughout the corporate’s French studios have taken half in an organised day of strike motion after annual wage negotiations collapsed.
The strike, organised by French sport staff union STJV (Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo), befell on 14th February throughout Ubisoft’s Paris, Montpellier, Annecy, Lyon, and Bordeaux studios. The STJV had referred to as for motion at first of this month, saying annual wage negotiations had reached an unsatisfactory conclusion.
“In current weeks,” the STJV wrote in a press release shared on the time, “Necessary Annual Negotiations on salaries have taken place in a number of Ubisoft entities in France, and the STJV was clearly current. Regardless of concerted efforts by union organisations to seek out an appropriate compromise, negotiations hit a wall.”
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The STJV accused Ubisoft administration of providing a “price range for will increase under inflation, for the second yr in a row”, saying the corporate was hiding behind a “purely arbitrary price discount coverage”. “How will we correlate this contempt with our CEO’s exhortations to ‘acquire agility and effectivity’?,” it wrote. “How may we settle for such a low degree of will increase when the corporate boasts of a second quarter ‘effectively past [our] expectations’, whereas desirous to ‘pay tribute to the distinctive dedication of the groups’? This reward system appears very poorly balanced to us.”
“That an organization that continues to make earnings, regardless of multi-deficient administration, decides to make staff pay to extend its earnings,” the union assertion continued, “is just unacceptable.” The STJV completed by calling for strike motion “for all French entities belonging to the Ubisoft group” on 14th February.
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Following Wednesday’s strike, the STJV shared an replace on a social media, writing that it had “completed counting the numbers and… almost 700 Ubisoft staff took half within the nationwide strike”. It added, “The pickets have been very effectively attended, and we’re significantly grateful to colleagues from different corporations and college students who got here out to lend their help, proving that the battle will all the time convey us collectively.”
“The message to Ubisoft’s administration is extraordinarily clear, in an organization the place the CEO as soon as strutted round claiming that ‘when a union involves Ubisoft, I will depart'”.
This week’s strike motion follows current criticism of one other French studio by the STJV. In a report printed final week, the union accused Banishers: Ghosts of Eden and Jusant developer Do not Nod of mismanagement, saying, “In a studio the place every venture erratically follows one other, time and long-term imaginative and prescient required for the staff’ welfare is disappearing.”
The STJV’s considerations of worker mistreatment are available in a yr that has already been devastating for staff throughout the video games trade, with a minimum of 6,000 layoffs having been introduced since 2024 started – in comparison with the ten,500 job cuts made throughout the entire of final yr.
