The world’s leading store for trading card games, the aptly named TCGplayer, has agreed to give its workers the right to form a union and agreed to bargain with its representatives. The Twitter account of the union confirmed the news, with the to-and-fro between the eBay-owned company and its workers dragging for a while now.
The employees at TCGplayer set out to unionize back on March 10, 2023 and secured sufficient votes to carry forth the undertaking. However, TCGplayer said that the election was not legitimate, arguing that Operations Leads should not have been allowed to vote at all.
The National Labor Relations Board however has not seen eye-to-eye with eBay, arguing that its request to invalidate the vote was not honored. TCGplayer employees and eBay have certainly not been on the best of terms over the past weeks and months. At one point, the union even lambasted eBay for allegedly trying to sabotage it. In an official tweet, TCGunion-CWA said:
This NLRB ruling is a testament to our persistence & our unity. We are stronger together, and we have a RIGHT to organize at work.
The union has been emboldened by its most recent success and has confirmed that it will now seek to formally enter negotiations with eBay, insisting to improve working conditions, pay, and the overall processes at the company. Not everyone has bulked at the idea of workers unionizing, however, with Card Kingdom, another company hosting a marketplace for Magic: The Gathering cards, agreeing to a unionization request from its workers, and potentially avoiding a similar unpleasantness should it have refused.
Unions have been historically a fraught moment in the industry, with many others attempting it. Disney, which teamed up with Ravensburger to release what could be the hottest trading car games of the year, and many to follow, has also been seeing its workers unionize, which is only fair as more workers are looking to receive fair payment.