CWA Canada Urges Competition Bureau to Scrutinize $55-billion Electronic Arts Buyout

OTTAWA (Dec. 12) – Following Electronic Arts’ (EA) October announcement of a proposed $55-billion buyout, CWA Canada President Carmel Smyth and CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. have sent a formal letter to Competition Bureau Canada calling for a comprehensive review of the unprecedented deal’s implications for Canadian workers and consumers. 

The proposed deal, which would be the largest leveraged buyout in history, would privatize one of the leading video game studios in Canada. The Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and American private equity firms, including Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, are part of the investor consortium seeking to acquire EA.

CWA represents over 6,000 video game workers, making it the largest union of video game workers in North America. The letter to the competition bureau  can be found here. 

“More than 1 in 10 video game workers in Canada work for Electronic Arts, so this deal would have a seismic impact on the industry,” Smyth said. “Competition Bureau Canada must fully investigate the impact of this massive transaction on the Canadian market and must not be a rubber stamp for billionaire investors.” 

Cummings said the deal is not about innovation or growth for the Canadian economy, “it’s about handing control to a small group of powerful investors and putting thousands of jobs and sensitive consumer data at risk.”

“I’m calling on Competition Bureau Canada to scrutinize this deal carefully and to ensure that this deal protects Canadian workers, consumers, and the future of the video game industry.”

In its letter, CWA outlines several concerns and risks with the deal, including:

• Labour market competition risks resulting from EA’s position as a major employer of Canadian video game workers, potentially allowing EA’s new owners to squeeze its workers further.
• Risks to consumer privacy posed by the potential aggregation of consumer data from various PIF-owned video game companies, which gather extensive personal, behavioral, technical, and location-based data. 

• Competition risks posed by EA’s prospective buyers’ ownership and investments in EA’s competitors, suppliers, and licensors.

EA employs more than 4,800 workers across the U.S. and Canada, and has already cut an estimated 1,700 U.S. jobs since 2023, adding to a record-breaking wave of mass layoffs across the video game industry. In October, United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433 (UVW-CWA), an industry-wide union for video game workers in the U.S. and Canada, released a statement raising serious concerns about the proposed deal. 

Workers launched a petition that has garnered support from the entire gaming community, with over 9,500 signatures from video game workers, EA employees, and fans of the Electronic Arts’ broad slate of games.

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About CWA Canada

CWA Canada is the country’s only all-media union, representing about 6,000 workers at the CBC, The Canadian Press, and newspapers and other companies coast to coast, including in the video game industry. Contact: editor@cwacanada.ca

About CODE-CWA

The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) is a network of worker-organizers and their staff working every single day to build the voice and power necessary to ensure the future of the tech, game, and digital industries in the United States and Canada. CODE-CWA is a project of the Communications Workers of America, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers throughout tech, media, telecom, and other industries who stand together to fight for justice on the job and in our communities.

About CWA

The Communications Workers of America represents working people in telecommunications, customer service, media, airlines, health care, public service and education, manufacturing, tech, and other fields.