The workers gathered outside an office building in downtown Syracuse, New York, on Wednesday were not happy. Sporting red union T-shirts and holding signs reading “You can’t punish us for being pregnant” and “When we fight, we win,” they were rallying to support a colleague. The building is home to TCGplayer, an eBay subsidiary that is the largest online marketplace for card games, comics, and collectible trading cards (think Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering), and the picket’s attendees were some of its employees, the roughly 250 people whose job is to authenticate, sort, and ship the collectibles.
“I felt like I was alone with this until I shared my story with members of the union, and it’s really inspiring that workers can have each other’s back when management fails us,” Wheeler said in a statement.
Now, when one thinks of major tech companies, eBay isn’t the first to come to mind. The bidding site is somewhat of a dinosaur, born during an earlier generation of the internet and not nearly as prominent as Alphabet (the parent company of Google), social media companies like Meta or Twitter, or e-commerce giants like Amazon. Yet eBay is still in operation, and it has around ten thousand employees, minuscule compared to Alphabet’s nearly two-hundred-thousand-person workforce — the majority of whom are denied employee status and instead classified as temporary vendor contractors, or TVCs in Alphabet’s nomenclature — but sizable by any other standard.
Employees picket the TCGplayer office in Syracuse, New York. (CODE-CWA)
And of those employees, the ones at TCGplayer represent an extreme rarity: unionized tech workers. eBay acquired the Syracuse-based company in 2022 for nearly $300 million, and the workers responded with a union blitz to secure stability under the new owner. They had been organizing since 2020, and their original organizing drive was with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), but employer misinformation and the onset of the pandemic led them to pull their petition for an NLRB election. After the sale to eBay, the workers regrouped, this time with CODE-CWA, which also represents Alphabet Workers United, the minority union at Google as well as unionized video-game workers at Sega, Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax, and Tender Claws. They filed for an NLRB election in early 2023, and when the ballots were counted in March, a majority of the 282 workers had voted to unionize. The final count was 137 in favor and 82 against.
eBay and TCGplayer fought the effort from the start. TCGplayer had retained premier anti-union law firm Littler Mendelson in 2020, and they continued using the firm after the sale to eBay. As workers told the Prospect, the company waged an “extremely intense” union-busting campaign, with anti-union messaging pervasive at the office. When those efforts failed to stymy workers’ union vote, eBay switched to filing objections to the election and appeals to NLRB decisions; the board found no merit in the employer’s protestations.
Rather than finally agreeing to bargain a first contract with its workers, eBay and TCGplayer continued to violate their rights, according to the union. CODE-CWA filed multiple ULP charges with the NLRB over the actions of both companies’ managements, who workers say refused to acknowledge the union and behaved in a way designed to obstruct their ability to negotiate a contract.
Workers additionally alleged that the bosses implemented unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment while refusing to negotiate with the union regarding those changes, a violation of status quo rules, and denied workers union representation during disciplinary procedures (known as Weingarten rights). eBay also removed language from its corporate human rights policy that had affirmed its support for workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, a move that elicited criticism not only from eBay’s workers but from the New York City and State Comptrollers on behalf of shareholders too. In December 2023, Region 3 of the NLRB found merit in the ULPs, affirming that eBay and TCGplayer broke the law in their response to worker organizing.
“We have experienced eBay’s refusal to respect our legally-protected rights first-hand. We applaud this ruling and hope that the reality of legal consequences will motivate the company to come to the table and bargain with us in good faith,” Ethan Salerius, receiving generalist at TCG Player and a bargaining committee member, said in a statement at the time.
“The CWA-TCGunion stands in solidarity with Megan and is advocating for a union contract that will ensure gender equity, fair accommodations, and reasonable paid time off,” said CODE-CWA in a statement concerning Wheeler’s alleged mistreatment. “These measures aim to prevent unjust disciplinary actions and promote a fair and supportive working environment for all employees.”
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CONTRIBUTORS
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
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