EBay Aims to Bust Trading Card Union with 200 Layoffs
Workers at TCGplayer in Syracuse, New York, have been fighting for a first contract for over 600 days. Photo: TCGunion-CWA
More than two years after voting in a union, the 220 workers at TCGplayer, the eBay-owned online marketplace for trading cards, hoped they might be getting close to securing a first contract. Instead, they’re fighting to save their jobs.
On May 22, the company abruptly announced that it was shuttering its Syracuse, New York, authentication center and moving operations to Louisville, Kentucky.
Spurred by unfair discipline and low pay, workers at TCGplayer became the first U.S. eBay workers to organize a union, joining Communications Workers Local 1123 in a March 2023 vote. According to a CWA report released last year, 60 percent of workers at the Syracuse center earn less than $19 an hour—and nearly 90 percent earned under $21 an hour. eBay brought in $2 billion in profits last year.
CWA has filed unfair labor practice charges at the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company’s decision to shut the Syracuse center is unlawful retaliation for workers’ organizing efforts. The closure comes after the company previously spent millions of dollars on anti-union law firms to attempt to keep the union out and then delayed bargaining.
“We need to call this what it is: an illegal and vicious attempt to break a union, all so that they won’t have to pay workers even an extra $1 an hour,” CWA said in a statement.
“There’s a long history of employers moving to avoid unionization,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “The law is very clear that you can’t do it to retaliate against the union—but it needs to be enforced.”
Employers try to get around the law by insisting that their decision to move was a business decision, unrelated to the union, and courts too often defer to employers, said Bronfenbrenner. “The idea that management rights always supersedes workers’ rights when you have freedom of association under the Constitution is a problem,” she said.
Workers rallied outside TCGplayer’s headquarters on May 27 along with local elected officials and supporters to protest the closure. The union is also calling for a boycott of TCGplayer to push them to keep the Syracuse center open.
A STRATEGIC ACQUISITION
Founded in 2008, TCGplayer was bought by eBay in October 2022 for $300 million, part of the latter’s strategic shift to niche markets. Workers at the center fulfill orders of Pokemon, Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and other trading cards.
The Syracuse workers are also responsible for authenticating high-value cards, inspecting them to verify that they meet quality standards. Their labor turned the company into the premier online marketplace for these cards.
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In 2020, workers had tried to join Service Employees (SEIU) Local 200. That effort was suppressed after management hired the union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson to lead the campaign against the union, combined with the pandemic. But long simmering issues like low pay remained unresolved, and a few months after the company’s acquisition by eBay, TCGplayer workers voted to join CWA.
‘STRIPPING US FOR PARTS’
“The pay is not sufficient, especially with the rising cost of housing in Syracuse,” said Richard Vallejo, a research and development specialist who has worked at TCGplayer for six years and is on the union’s bargaining team. “At the same time the demand for output and performance has always been greater and greater.”
“The company has become much more corporate, even before the eBay acquisition,” Vallejo said. “Management teams were becoming less understanding and compassionate.”
Even after they won their election two years ago, workers had to fight to get the company to recognize the union. eBay challenged the certification, arguing that workers like Vallejo should be considered supervisors and the election should be re-run. Eventually eBay agreed to sit down at the bargaining table, but then dragged out negotiations for more than 600 days before announcing the closure.
Vallejo said it was frustrating to watch another employer decide to leave Syracuse, a Rust Belt city that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in recent decades and now has the highest child-poverty rate among big cities in the U.S.
The TCGplayer workforce is overwhelmingly young workers, Vallejo said. “People have come from restaurant, retail, and service industry work, and saw this as an opportunity to start a career, to start a family.” A significant number are queer, trans, or neurodivergent, Vallejo said. CWA had recently reached a tentative agreement with the company on a gender equity article that the union had fought hard for.
But instead of finalizing a first contract, the Local 1123 bargaining team is now fighting to increase severance payments and secure benefit extensions for the union’s soon-to-be-laid-off members. According to eBay’s plans, union members will be let go in June and July.
“They’re essentially stripping us for parts,” said Vallejo. “They wanted some of the technology from TCGplayer, they want the name, the brand recognition in the niche industry of trading cards. Now they’re just moving it into an eBay facility, just ditching us.”
Sign a petition in support of CWA members at TCGplayer here.
