All We Have is Us
Jun 14, 2025
[This was my opening speech given at the IWGB Game Workers Union 2025 Annual General Meeting, slightly modified here for clarity]
Hello everyone, welcome to the IWGB Game Workers 2025 Annual General Meeting. It’s great to see you all here. This is the end of my fourth and final year as Chair of this branch and I’d like to take a moment to kick us off today.
I watched the first season of Andor for the third time recently and for those of you not familiar with the show, it’s set in the Star Wars universe and focuses on everyday people and their struggle to survive against the massive oppression from the empire. Whereas previous Star Wars media feels more like superhero movies because of their focus on the Jedi, Andor feels more akin to a drama with everyday people that I can actually relate to.
In the show, Maarva is someone who is well known in her small community. She’s seen the empire change over the decades she’s lived in her relatively small mining town and has radicalised in her older age as it became clear that the empire is not leaving and is exerting more and more control over their lives.
When talking to her son about finding a way to survive while under the boot of the empire, she explains, “All we have is us.” She’s reminding him that no one else is coming to save us, and if someone is going to fix the situation we find ourselves in, it has to be us. Not an elected official. Not some magical savior. The people in the room. Us. You. Me. Us. It's both a daunting and liberating thought because it’s a lot of work, but the good news is that we don't need to wait for permission to start.
All we have is us.
You and I may not live under the fictionalised empire with Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, but we’re not so different from the characters in Andor. The past couple of years have been extraordinary for the entire games industry and many of us have seriously struggled to stay afloat. Raise your hand if you or someone you know was affected by redundancies in the past two years.
Raise your hand if you’ve been asked to do more work for the same amount of pay. Raise your hand if you’ve seen your wages stagnate or drop. Raise your hand if you’ve been mistreated at work.
Look around the room and online at how many peoples’ lives have been upended through no fault of their own. Look at how much of our community has been impacted by decisions often completely out of their control. The games industry has made more money than ever this past year, but that doesn’t matter to the CEOs and executives. They want more.
They choose to make people redundant and use generative AI instead. They want you to work more for less pay and they want you to silently obey. They want us to make the games exactly as they say except when they change their minds and want it that way instead. They will attack any individual who speaks up by themselves and they will destroy peoples’ income by firing them or making them redundant without a second thought. They are trying to build empires and they want us to do the work of building it for them, but only so long as we’re compliant.
All we have is us.
These past years tens of thousands of game workers supported each other as we went through the largest mass redundancy event in our industry’s history. Across the world, over 30,000 of us have been made redundant. In the first year of the redundancies, we had more people join our union than any previous year. Members created group chats to support each other and help coordinate pushing for better redundancy terms. They helped each other update their CVs, shared job ads, and built a space to vent and talk through everything. I don't know how many redundancies members ended up being affected by these past two years, but it was a lot. It was too many.
What I heard from members time and time again is that having that space to talk with coworkers and people in the union was incredibly important to everyone involved, both those going through redundancies and those staying at the company. It helped everyone feel less alone and supported instead of being isolated. That sense of community made it all bearable. People were struggling and community was a lifeline they could hold onto.
All we have is us.
When I started working in the games industry over 18 years ago, I struggled a bit because I felt like I wasn't directly helping people with the work I did. A coworker told me I was bringing joy to people who played the games we made, and he was right, but something was still missing. I wanted the people I worked with to feel that same joy on a day to day basis at work and it’s been very clear over time that they often do not. When we formed this union over six years ago, I found the piece that was missing because I could directly see how our work in the union helped people I worked with.
There have been some amazingly dedicated people who have done a lot of work in our union and there have been people who have chipped in here and there where they can. Both are important. Something I've learned is that our ability to create change in our workplaces and the industry at large is directly related to the number of people who put energy into making it happen. No one can change the industry alone.
All we have is us.
If you look back in history, the times when workers were able to win better working conditions was when they were organised and active. In the early 1900s, workers in unions won the weekend, the 8 hour workday, the NHS, abolished child labour, created the minimum wage, and so much more.
Since those wins were cemented, capitalists have chipped away at them bit by bit until they're a spectre of what they used to be. They realised how much collective power workers had and so used the state to ban or weaken many of the tactics that workers use. Millionaires and billionaires waged public campaigns against unions to wear down membership so that it's easier to keep you working long hours for low wages, to outsource your jobs to even more underpaid workers, and to lay you off for short term gains.
They're not going to stop. They'll never be happy with any amount of profit and will always look to extract more from us. I don’t say this to scare you, but so that we're on the same page. What they're doing is scary and what they’re doing has a huge impact on us. But if we're too scared to do anything about it, it's only going to get worse. We have to turn fear into courage and use our courage to move towards action. The only way we'll ever improve things is by building enough power to fight back and take what's rightfully ours, our dignity and respect.
All we have is us.
While it’s important we push back on the capitalists who constantly try to make our lives worse, we also have to dream up and work towards creating a better world than the one we’re living in today.
Any of the active members of our branch, and especially the people who will be elected today, would love to help you figure out how to help out and take steps towards making a better games industry for ourselves and those who come after us. If you don’t know who they are, speak with me or send a message in branch group chat.
During the breaks and after the meeting today, trade contact information with each other and talk about what actions you’d like to work on together. Plan a social in your area, start a reading group or book club, figure out who to talk with at work about joining our union, create a group chat for your workplace organising efforts, look over our manifesto and choose which changes you’d like to push for at your workplace, write an essay about unions or draft some social media posts, draw some art to use as propaganda, create a salary survey for your workplace or region, or take some training on how to respond to redundancies or how to organise your workplace.
Start small and try something new! Think of it as an experiment. Getting even two other people to join you in an action is a fantastic first step. Each one of those things I mentioned is important, so pick one and focus on it. You don’t have to do everything, just your part.
Don't wait until you're thirsty to dig a well. Don't wait until you're hungry to plant your crops. Don't wait until you need a powerful union to build one.
All we have is us, and we’re all we need.
Thank you Ashley, Matthew, and Charlie for your wonderful proofreading and feedback on this speech. <3