Thousands of cards come through TCGplayer’s Authentication Center in Syracuse, New York, each week. Each and every Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, or Yu-Gi-Oh card on sale at TCGplayer — the online trading card marketplace that was purchased by eBay in 2022 — is processed by hand to ensure authenticity and evaluate condition. That work is completed by specialists tasked with inspecting and intaking packages from sellers that amount to anywhere from a handful of cards to 14,000 in a given package. Julia Giacona, a receiving generalist at TCGplayer, said they touch tens of thousands of cards weekly.
From 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Giacona counts, inspects, and inventories mostly Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. They stand at cabinets most of the day, filing away the inspected cards. “It gets pretty rough when you’re just standing in one spot, sedentary, for extended periods of time,” Giacona said. “A lot of my co-workers have sciatica issues. It hurts more to not move than it does to move.” Megan Wheeler, another receiving generalist who is currently pregnant, told Polygon that the job impacts backs and eyes, too: Evaluating cards often means hunching over, straining your eyes to look at all the minutiae of the card’s details, down to marks or nicks, which impact value.
Receiving the cards is the first step in a three-part system, according to Wheeler. Wheeler said after intake and inspection, the cards go into a warehouse-esque storage system before they’re eventually pulled for individual orders and shipped out; the cards purchased from TCGplayer touch a lot of hands throughout the process. And those hands, and the people attached to them, are highly specialized; both Wheeler and Giacona are intimately familiar with trading cards and all their little, nuanced details. “It’s very detail-oriented and you have to be paying attention all the time to the slight little inconsistencies and looking out for fake cards and set symbols, things like that,” Giacona said.
TCGplayer workers, who have been unionized with Communications Workers of America for about a year, told Polygon eBay isn’t paying its hourly workers a fair wage for the work they do; Giacona said their role starts at $16.25 per hour, a number they called insulting for the specialized nature of the job. (They said the other departments, like shipping, tend to be “critically underpaid,” too.) That’s why the union is rallying in Syracuse on Thursday, just after publishing a detailed report on both wages at TCGplayer and the cost-of-living expense of the warehouse’s locale. The report — which surveyed 54 Authentication Center workers — says that 87% of the workers “earn less than a living wage in Syracuse, NY for a single person without children.”
The union includes roughly 280 people in non-managerial jobs across sorting, research, receiving, shipping, and other operations. TCGplayer employed more than 600 people when the company was acquired by eBay in 2022. TCGplayer workers won the National Labor Relations Board union election on March 10, and as of the time of this writing, don’t have a contract with eBay. With Thursday’s rally and the subsequent report, TCGplayer workers hope to compel eBay to “get serious at the bargaining table and agree to reasonable contract terms,” the union said in its report.
A representative for eBay told Polygon, “When we began the bargaining process, we agreed with the CWA that we would address the non-economic components of the contract before discussing economic topics like wages. We have a handful of remaining non-economic proposals to agree upon before we move to economic discussions, which we expect to occur soon.” The representative said eBay and the union “meet and bargain regularly,” including two sessions during the week of the rally.
For employees like Wheeler, the agreements can’t come soon enough.
“My manager asked me, ‘Oh, have you painted the nursery?’” Wheeler, a union member, told Polygon. “And I’m like, I don’t have room for a nursery. I’m renting an apartment that I can hardly afford. No, I don’t have room for a nursery, much less to paint one.”
Giacona said the rally will showcase the union’s solidarity with each other, their other co-workers, and the Syracuse community at large. TCGplayer is one of Syracuse’s largest employers, they said, and raised wages could mean more competitive pay elsewhere in the city. “[It’ll] enrich the community and the local economy as a whole,” Giacona said. “That’s our hope.”
In 2022, eBay purchased TCGplayer for $295 million. TCGplayer spun out of tabletop card company Ascension Gaming Network, which was founded in 2002, before relaunching in 2008 as a marketplace, according to Syracuse.com. The company has authenticated more than 115 million trading cards as of 2022, 32 million of which were in 2021 alone. In a news release alongside the eBay announcement, the company cited the “substantial growth” of both the new and secondhand trading card market — a niche market that boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that, in 2021, TCGplayer founder and former CEO Chedy Hampson said in a news release that TCGplayer saw “triple digit growth” in 2020. Hampson left the company shortly after the eBay sale, per Syracuse.com.
eBay, as a whole, appears to be doing quite well: Revenue in 2023 was up 3% to bring in $10.1 billion. Meanwhile, workers say, TCGplayer workers’ wages start at New York state’s minimum wage of $15 per hour, “and rise only a few dollars after years with the company,” according to the report. The report also says 60% of workers make less than $19 per hour, which it says does not meet the cost of living for the area.
“We hear our team members’ concerns regarding wages,” the eBay representative said, “and remain committed to reaching a collective bargaining agreement that positions our team and company for continued growth and success.”
The rallying workers are hoping the union’s report and Thursday’s rally will encourage eBay to come to the table to agree on a contract that addresses fair pay issues at the company.
“I put everything, my whole heart, in my work,” Wheeler said. “And to see that come back with almost nothing, to hear them say they care but not show it… to go through something that should be as wonderful as pregnancy and preparing for a family and to be worried about choosing between my job or my family. It feels terrible. It feels like it belongs much further in the past than 2024.”
Source：https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/459782/tcgplayer-union-ebay-rally-fair-pay
