Workers at Ubisoft Halifax form company’s first North American union

CITYnews halifax/ BySteve Gow

Local employees at the Halifax studio of a video game giant have formed a union, after receiving certification by the Nova Scotia Labour Board.

French video game company Ubisoft is responsible for hit games like Assassin’s Creed: Rebellion, designed at its studio in Halifax. Staff at Ubisoft Halifax are now members of theGame & Media Workers Guild of Canada after being certified just before Christmas.

According to one of the organizers behind the push to form the local union, nearly 74 per cent of employees in Halifax voted in favour of the move.

“It kind of reaffirms something that has always been true at Ubisoft Halifax, which is the employees there are engaged, they’re involved,” says Jon Huffman, a lead programmer at the company. “They want to have a voice in the conversation around their working conditions and around the work that they do.”

He adds that most staff members are content at Ubisoft Halifax, noting that forming a union was only intended to secure jobs as the industry saw layoffs in a post-COVID world.

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Huffman also says the company did not aggressively try to deter the union from forming, although it will mark a big change for how the Halifax studio operates.

“We weren’t looking at it in terms of (being) angry, or we’re upset about our working conditions,” said Huffman. “Instead, we were looking at it from the angle of wanting to maintain these things, we want to protect them, we want to expand and grow them.”

The next steps, Huffman says, will be to design and create the structure of the union internally, involving the entire union body in decisions.

According to Ubisoft’s website, the company has around 17,000 employees in offices and studios around the world.