At least 5,000 employees of Evolution Georgia, an online gambling service, will reportedly go on strike demanding better working conditions and higher salaries.
On Friday, representatives of the employees announced that they would begin their strike on 12 July, citing unsafe and unsanitary workplace conditions, harassment by managers, and meagre pay.
Evolution Georgia, a Swedish company listed in Stockholm that provides gambling services to a number of prominent online casinos internationally, claims to have up to 8,000 employees.
The company’s employees have for months been trying to negotiate for better workplace conditions and salaries, with talks falling through on Friday.
The protest within Evolution Georgia escalated following the release of screenshots of internal communications between members of the company’s management, which included sexist, racist, and discriminatory remarks against employees.
On Monday, Mautskebeli, a left-wing online magazine, published footage purported to have been shot in a small restroom used as a break room by janitors at Evolution Gaming, a subsidiary of Evolution Georgia. The person filming the video says that the janitors are only given one bean bag to sit on, facing a toilet, on which they have their lunch.
Evolution Georgia issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the communications seen in the screenshots as ‘unacceptable’ and promising to investigate. They vowed to ‘get to the bottom of the problem and take appropriate actions and increase our efforts to make sure that all employees adhere to, and respect, our common values’.
On Friday, Giorgi Diasamidze, the chair of LABOR, a local union, announced that up to 5,000 people would initially join the strike.
‘For two years now, the labour union and the [employees of Evolution], have been conducting negotiations for decent labour rights at Evolution Georgia’, Diasamidze said at a press briefing.
He said they had encountered ‘the exact same attitude in the negotiation process as you read in the screenshots’ of the leaked conversations.
He added that Evolution Georgia had exploited university students, and that ‘society should fix it’.
The strike follows a period of mandatory mediation between the union and the company, which LABOR said had failed to bear results.
On Friday, the Social Justice Centre, a Tbilisi-based rights group, urged the Labour Inspection Service to provide an appropriate response to the employees’ demands.
Evolution Georgia has previously faced criticism for labour conditions at the company. In March 2020, the company laid off 1,300 employees, citing the economic situation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Social Justice Centre subsequently filed a lawsuit against the company on behalf of 14 terminated employees.
In 2022, Georgia’s then-Public Defender Nino Lomjaria reported that there were instances of sexual harassment at the company, with employees stating that they had received sexually suggestive and humiliating messages.
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