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Ubisoft Closes Halifax Studio Just After Employees Unionized (insider-gaming.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 42 points 10 months ago (9 children)

And the message is:

Unions should be a constitutional right

(And it is, in Denmark)

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  • [–] 27 points 10 months ago* (8 children)

    It is also a right in Canada, where this happened and where we don't refer to our rights as "constitutional" since they don't primarily derive from our constitution but rather from the charter of freedoms and case law

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    These employees did exercise their right to unionize, but there's no way to force employers to keep the union. A union just means that you can bargain collectively, and it should theoretically protect employees because what kind of scummy employer wants to fire ALL their employees, right? Turns out Ubisoft IS that scummy.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    I mean it absolutely is illegal to retaliate against unionizing workers by firing them, that's why they didn't say "we fired them because they unionized". And Canada isn't America, we don't have right to work legislation and you can't generally just fire people en masse without cause out of the blue

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Except ubisoft is hemorrhaging money so it's an extremely easy sell to say "the studio is not profitable and we're in dire need to cut waste" and indeed can the lot.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    They can, and they can try to make the case that this is unrelated to unionization and fight that in court. Good luck

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    I mean, I'd bet dollars to donuts Ubisoft would win it handily if it gets to a class action or whatever equivalent.

    For one, they're basically on the verge of falling over so the economic motivation is a no-brainer.

    For two, it's a massive multinational company headquartered in France (a country with stronger labour laws than Canada) with plenty of legal advice available on these matters. I highly doubt they'd do it this blatantly if they were not confident this is an easy sell, instead of waiting something like 6 months to separate the 2 events enough for plausible deniability.

    For three, good luck holding a foreign company accountable, in general.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I highly doubt they’d do it this blatantly if they were not confident this is an easy sell

    I mean, I would have agreed with you, except we've also just recently seen even more blatant and indefensible union-busting from Rockstar in the UK, another country with good labour laws, and another country with more than adequate legal resources.

    I think you're probably right that Ubisoft has sufficient legal cover to win this case, but that's because of the merits of this case, not because a big company from a country with good laws could never do something stupidly illegal.

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