Cards Against Humanity workers announce union after weeks of turmoil

by Gaby Del Valle

Source: Wikicommons

Workers at Cards Against Humanity, the multimillion dollar board game company, are unionizing. Employees presented management with a demand letter today, asking them to  voluntarily recognize the union on the heels of a weeks-long public reckoning over instances of racism and harassment at the company. Workers are organizing with the Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board of Workers United, a Chicago affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.

“Amidst these challenging past weeks, we, your members of your powerfully diverse and capable of staff have built a shared vision of the future for CAH,” the letter reads. “In our vision, the contributions of the workers are known and appreciated, marginalized voices and stories are amplified and heard, our diversity is celebrated and encouraged at work, we are given equity—both in power and opportunity. The collective has not merely had this vision, but has practiced this together. We know a better Cards Against Humanity is possible. We also know it is necessary.”

The unionization effort came together quickly. Earlier this month, after former black CAH employees began discussing their experiences with racism within the company, current workers began discussing the company culture among themselves. “We formed a rapid response collective to stop having individual conversations and start having a more unified voice,” a current full-time employee with CAH, who asked for anonymity, told Strikewave. 

In Signal group chats and Zoom meetings, workers discussed the problems they and others had witnessed at CAH: the “dismissal of racial microaggressions, and specifically the way that leadership is really centralized at the company, the way that employees are separated from each other, those kind of things,” the full-time employee said. 

Their discussions took on a greater urgency after CAH co-founder Max Temkin, who had been accused of sexual assault outside the company and of creating a toxic culture within it, resigned earlier this month. Temkin’s resignation, though long overdue, created what one current employee called a “power vacuum” within the embattled company. Workers soon began worrying a management turnover would mean more of the same, said the employee, a contractor who asked to be quoted anonymously. “We thought that the only logical next step was to formalize our power as workers and find a union that could represent us,” the contractor said.

Workers say their goal is to create a more equitable culture within Cards Against Humanity that lives up to the values the company projects to the world. The company has spoken out against the Trump administration, bought a piece of land along the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to slow down construction of the president’s border wall, and funded a scholarship for women in STEM. But recent social media posts by former employees and a lengthy exposé in Polygon paint a picture of a culture plagued by racist and sexist microaggressions and a company where friendships and favoritism determine workers’ success. “There's a lot of big, structural problems where if you’re not aligned with the right people, you’re not going to get anything,” the full-time employee said. “If you don't have people in power advocating for you, then nothing happens.”

One of their key goals is to end the company’s reliance on freelance contract labor. Eight of the CAH’s 30 staffers are part-time independent contractors, according to a lengthy statement the company released this month in response to the Polygon story. Four others are part-time employees. Despite doing nearly the same work as their full- and part-time counterparts, CAH’s freelance workers don’t receive health insurance or other benefits, putting them at a disadvantage. 

A decade after its founding, Cards Against Humanity is still owned and largely operated by its eight co-founders: a group of college buddies who wrote the initial set of cards used in the game. Many of those cards are still in circulation—but in the years since launching on Kickstarter in 2010, CAH hired a team of writers to come up with new card ideas and cycle out old cards that were deemed racist, sexist, or otherwise insensitive. The company has become more racially diverse in recent years, though former employees told Polygon that they were retaliated against for disagreeing with Temkin or the other co-founders’ ideas or for advocating for cards that reflected marginalized voices.

CAH management remained largely white even as the company hired more people of color. “The problem is that a lot of the diversity is located within people who are [independent contractors] on 1099s, and there’s no diversity in leadership,” a full-time employee said. “The people who are in leadership roles do not come from marginalized backgrounds.”

Workers say the union is an effort to rectify past wrongs and prevent future harm. “The owners have a chance to live their values here,” said a full-time employee. “This is an opportunity for them.”

Gaby Del Valle is a reporter focusing on immigration and labor. She is the co-founder of BORDER/LINES, a weekly immigration policy newsletter.