Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena development team voted 79 to 16 on June 23 to certify United Wizards of the Coast, the first union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board tally covered 102 eligible workers across animation, art, design, engineering, and QA at the company’s Renton, Washington office. It also arrived under a shadow the Hasbro-owned publisher built for itself three years earlier, when it sent Pinkerton agents to a fan’s front door over a leaked pack of cards.
The organizing drive began in late April, when Arena senior software engineer Damien Wilson announced the effort on behalf of the Communications Workers of America. “At Wizards, we’re organizing for a say in layoffs, accountability that runs up and down the chain, and a living wage that actually lets people build a life,” Wilson said in a statement to press. The union asked Hasbro for voluntary recognition by May 1. Wizards let the deadline pass. The company’s public statement said it was “committed to fostering a workplace where every person feels heard, valued, and supported” and pointed to its “direct relationship” with employees as the reason a union was unnecessary.
Behind that statement, the NLRB case filing showed Wizards had retained Fisher Phillips, a law firm that markets an “interactive union organizing activity map” to clients and has built a national practice advising companies on how to defeat organizing campaigns. Arena team members later told reporters the company followed up with mandatory meetings, letters sent to employees’ homes, and a daily email campaign aimed at the bargaining unit before the vote. None of it moved the needle. The election closed 79 to 16 in the union’s favor.
For workers watching the fight, the company’s history made the tactics land differently than a standard anti-union playbook. In April 2023, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg posted unboxing videos of an unreleased Magic set, March of the Machine: The Aftermath, after unknowingly buying the product early from a reseller. Pinkerton agents showed up at his home the following Saturday morning, demanded the cards back, and raised the subject of jail time to him and his wife. Wizards confirmed to Polygon and Kotaku that the agents were part of its investigation into the leak. Gizmodo reporter Linda Codega found the 2023 incident was not the company’s first recourse to the firm: a source described a similar Pinkerton deployment in 2017 over a leaked Ixalan foil sheet.
Pinkerton’s name carries a specific weight in American labor history that has nothing to do with card games. Founded in 1850, the agency spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the enforcement arm of choice for industrialists fighting organized labor. Henry Clay Frick hired 300 Pinkerton agents to break the 1892 Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill; the ensuing gun battle killed several strikers and agents and triggered a national outcry that led Congress to pass the Anti-Pinkerton Act the following year, barring the federal government from hiring the firm. Pinkerton agents were also deployed against striking coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The company has spent decades since rebranding into corporate risk management, but the union-busting reputation followed it into the present: Amazon hired Pinkerton to monitor warehouse workers for union activity in 2020, and Starbucks brought on a former Pinkerton employee for its own anti-union effort in 2022.
Wizards never had to invoke Pinkerton by name during the Arena union drive. The company didn’t need to. A publisher that had already sent private investigators to a fan’s home over cardboard packaging chose Fisher Phillips and a saturation email campaign instead, and workers who had followed the 2023 story took the pattern as confirmation of where the company’s instincts sit when it feels ownership of something threatened, whether that something is a leaked rare or a bargaining unit. The vote count suggests it didn’t work.
United Wizards of the Coast now moves to contract negotiations, the stage where voluntary recognition fights and certification elections stop being symbolic. Wizards will have to bargain in good faith under federal law, though the timeline and substance of that bargaining remain open questions the company controls as much as the union does. Does a company with three documented decades of anti-union legal strategy behind it approach that table any differently than it approached the leak, or does Fisher Phillips simply become this year’s Pinkerton?
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I'm actually glad to see this happen.
The union will dig itself in, increase costs, codify corruption, make it nearly impossible to fire underperforming employees, saddle the parent company with increased legal and personnel costs, and will inevitably go on strike for a bigger slice of a shrinking pie at exactly the worst possible time to do so.*
Good I say.
Burn that company down to the foundation, then bulldoze and bury that too because it's cracked, leaking, and built on unstable ground.
*In my city, the local newspaper was on death's door--the perfect time for its union of different unions to strike and sue. Those unions had their day in court/arbitration and they "won". The paper, unable to operate under the new terms, declared bankruptcy, folded, and everyone got fired.
The problem with most unions is that they are only interested in union dues, and eventually side with management instead of the workers.
If you have a non-binding union, one that cares about the workers, they'd also care about the company, and work as a stand-between for both.
But then, a council would do the same thing.