Posts tagged designers
Los Angeles Times Journalists Ratify New Labor Contract, Averting Strike
December 4, 2025 // The deal offers members thousands of dollars in raises. Employees at the Times will receive $3,000 in wage increases in the first year of the contract, $2,750 in the second year and $2,500 in the third year. Those who work at Times Community News will receive $5,000 raises in the first year of the deal and $4,000 in the second and third years. The contract also enshrines Juneteenth as a holiday, codifies protections around employees using their chosen names and pronouns and asserts that the paper must respond when members face online harassment. The deal requires that management disclose any mandatory drug testing in job postings and creates union-covered “per diem” positions (a move intended to limit the use of non-union freelancers and temporary workers).
Blizzard’s Platform & Technology workers vote to unionize
October 17, 2025 // Early today, over 400 staff from the company's Platform and Technology department – including designers, engineers, QA testers, localization teams, and workers on Battle.net – voted to join several other Blizzard divisions to unionize. Microsoft has reportedly recognized the union. As reported by GameDeveloper, organizing committee members Daniel Weltz, Alex Kohn, and Timothy Biley decided to unionize following the departure of colleagues because of low pay or redundancies, stating "workplaces will now have to offer certain things in order to remain competitive to workers."
Hundreds of Southern California Edison planners, technicians file for union election
April 22, 2025 // A separate union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 47, already represents construction linemen who install and maintain the overhead distribution and transmission lines. John Mader, president of ESC Local 20, urged the company to take a neutral approach to the union so that workers could eventually vote in an election “without interference or intimidation.”
UAW Local 2110 Requests Abrams Unionization Vote
April 10, 2025 // UAW Local 2110, which bills itself as a union for “technical, office, and professional workers,” also represents employees at HarperCollins (the sole Big Five publisher to have a union), the New Press, and the Asian American Writers Workshop, as well as workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Columbia University.
As Off Broadway Crews Unionize, Workers See Hope, Producers Peril
February 11, 2025 // Striking stage crews have idled the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company — the birthplace of the musicals “Spring Awakening,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which all transferred to Broadway and won Tonys. The strike, which began last month, comes amid a drive to unionize stagehands and crews at Off Broadway theaters. Nonprofit companies and producers fear that the unionization push could drive up costs at a moment when many are running deficits and staging fewer, and smaller, shows. Second Stage Theater and Soho Rep both recently moved out of their longtime venues and opted to share space with other companies. Another measure of the sector’s shrinkage: In 2019 there were 113 shows eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor Off Broadway work; there are just 59 eligible shows so far this season, which, for the Lortels, closes at the end of March.
461 employees at ZeniMax Online Studios have unionized
December 20, 2024 // Another union has formed within Microsoft in a bid to 'create protections against layoffs and workplace exploitation.'
Op-Ed: The Case for Gig Worker Benefits
December 19, 2024 // Independent workers miss out on many fringe benefits associated with regular employment, such as disability insurance, life insurance, or health insurance. They are also ineligible for paid family or medical leave. In 2022, the proportion of self-employed adults lacking health insurance (18 percent) was substantially higher than that among all working-age adults (12 percent). These disparities result to some extent from tax policy. For the best part of a century, businesses have provided health insurance, pensions, and other fringe benefits to employees with pretax dollars—perks that self-employed workers did not enjoy.
Commentary: Biden’s Independent-Contracting Rule Destroys Worker Independence
January 16, 2024 // A recent regulatory change by the Biden administration is so poorly designed, there’s no telling exactly how many workers will be hurt.