Bethesda Employees Plan Rallies Next Week to Protest Major Layoffs

Workers from Bethesda Game Studios’ union are gearing up for a significant rally next week to protest the recent wave of layoffs that affected 440 union members across Bethesda and ZeniMax.

OneBGS, the union affiliated with the CWA that represents the team behind titles like Fallout, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls, is organizing marches outside the studio locations in Montreal, Canada; Rockville, Maryland; and Austin and Dallas, Texas, on July 15 at 12:30 PM Eastern time.

In a statement, the OneBGS organizing committee expressed their determination:

“The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified. To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday, July 15th.

We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th.”

According to OneBGS, the mass layoffs earlier this week resulted in the elimination of 440 union positions across Bethesda and ZeniMax. WARN Act notices have provided additional details on the layoffs, indicating that 96 individuals at id Software were let go, along with 40 remote workers connected to the Dallas studio, and 22 at BGS Austin. Additionally, 213 employees at ZeniMax Online in Maryland, who were working on The Elder Scrolls Online, and another 166 at ZeniMax Media were affected. Overall, the layoffs impacted around 1,600 workers within Xbox alone, with a total of 4,800 across all of Microsoft. Another 1,600 layoffs are anticipated at Xbox in the next year, marking a trend of annual mass layoffs over the past three years.

In light of these events, unions across Xbox have been pushing to negotiate layoff terms for their members. Several unions have been in contract discussions with the company for months, but union representatives reported last week that Xbox had stalled negotiations. Earlier this week, OneBGS employees set up memorials in common areas for their laid-off colleagues, only to be instructed by HR to remove them.