“Catastrophic” Comments Made By Ubisoft CEO Have Workers Planning A Strike

Work­ers of Ubisoft Paris are look­ing to strike in response to com­ments recent­ly made by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guille­mot. These work­ers are demand­ing increased salaries, more trans­paren­cy, a four-day work week, and an end to abu­sive man­age­ment tactics.

Accord­ing to PC Gamer, the union’s action is both a con­se­quence of Guille­mot’s com­ments and Ubisoft­’s cur­rent finan­cial state. Ear­li­er this month, Ubisoft canceled three unnamed projects, as well as delay­ing Skull and Bones again. The com­pa­ny also stat­ed that Mario + Rab­bids: Sparks of Hope failed to meet sales expec­ta­tions. Delays, com­bined with low­er sales, have put Ubisoft in a dif­fi­cult finan­cial position.

CEO Yves Guille­mot send an email to Ubisoft staff, which was obtained by Kotaku. With­in this email, Guille­mot is urg­ing his employ­ees to work hard­er and spend less. The emails reads: “Today more than ever, I need your full ener­gy and com­mit­ment to ensure we get back on the path to suc­cess. I am also ask­ing each of you to be espe­cial­ly care­ful and strate­gic with your spend­ing and ini­tia­tives, to ensure we’re being as effi­cient and lean as possible.”

The Ubisoft Paris chap­ter of Sol­i­daries Infor­ma­tique released a state­ment in response to this email. Sol­i­daries Infor­ma­tique is a trade union that encom­pass­es sev­er­al tech com­pa­nies in France. The state­ment claims Guille­mot’s words push employ­ees to give into “man­age­r­i­al pres­sure” and work “over­time.” They also hint­ed at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of future lay­offs, stu­dio clo­sures, and salary decreas­es. Accord­ing to the union’s state­ment Guille­mot’s mes­sage includ­ed hid­den inten­tions to shift blame from man­age­ments deci­sions, onto the employ­ees, all while ask­ing them to take on the finan­cial and labor bur­den for the company.

Along with this state­ment, the union made four demands:

• An imme­di­ate 10% increase for all salaries, regard­less of annu­al increas­es, to com­pen­sate for infla­tion. With the hun­dreds of mil­lions of euros obtained from Ten­cent (opens in new tab), there is mon­ey in the cof­fers of the employers.
• The improve­ment of work­ing con­di­tions, in par­tic­u­lar, the imple­men­ta­tion of the four-day week.
• Trans­paren­cy on the evo­lu­tion of the work­force, both local­ly and globally.
• A strong com­mit­ment against dis­guised dis­missals and con­dem­na­tion of abu­sive man­age­r­i­al poli­cies that push employ­ees to resign.

The strike is sup­posed to take place on Jan­u­ary 27th from 2 to 6 p.m. CET.