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A former employee has supposedly reported Nintendo to the National Labor Relations Board for violating the right to organize a union.
There's still more investigations to follow, but supposedly these violations have been happening since even when Iwata and Reggie were in charge.

The reporter's Twitter thread of the article for some follow ups

A former employee explaining that this is not limited to Nintendo of America

As for my thoughts, I've said this many times in the past: I love Nintendo games, but as a business they need to be better. The strict copyright policies are one thing, but if all these violations are true then they really need to get their shit together fast. I don't want another situation where people are gonna make you guilty for liking Nintendo games (the same way people wanna make you feel guilty for liking Harry Potter despite JKR's stance on transgender people)

Nintendo themselves have issued a statement and said the firing had nothing to do with the contractor trying to form a union, but because they disclosed confidential information

Given unions are known mainly for things like preventing crunch and improving working conditions, and Nintendo is famous for being one of the few AAA companies that's anti-crunch and has actively worked to fix working conditions at studios like Retro and such, I'm starting to feel this is less a case of "Nintendo of America is run by union busters" and more "former employee got fired for legit reason, and is now lying in order to swing public opinion in their favor."

Also the timing of this along with the NSO leak (where Game Boy/Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance emulators made for the Switch by NERD have been leaked via 4chan) feels so weird. If they end up being connected then I guess we know who leaked the NSO stuff.

Karen Abraham in that article’s comments is sadly right, no matter what Nintendo says people are already taking the allegations as fact and putting them on the same level as Acti-Blizz. Like look at Twitter (surprise surprise) there’s comments like “lol they lying, they’re still shit, etc”

Plus a bunch of people who retweeted Stephen Totillo's first report on this whole thing sure as shit aren't retweeting his post about Nintendo's response. But as you said, what the hell else should I expect from the cesspit that is twitter?

Yeah I feel like we’ll need more details

Right now I’m leaning towards Nintendo, but who knows what could come out

Wouldn't a big corporation benefit from lying? Not to go all soyjak but should we really go "Corporate statement, Japan" on Nintendo covering their asses? I think skepticism against Nintendo is a fair stance on the situation.

Yeah, not to go all "NINTENDRONES!!!" here, but how many of y'all would be decrying le Twitter Mob Justice™ if it were, say, Sony or Microsoft or (insert other Evil Triple-Eh Publisher here)

I definitely agree in that there certainly needs to be more investigation and that this is a wait-and-see thing. Considering Reggie is no longer President of Nintendo I’d like to hear his thoughts on the manner considering there’s allegations that go as far back as his time as president.

It seems there's more coming in about Nintendo's working conditions, and based on this article most if not all are coming from contractors.

In contrast Kit and Krysta, who worked at Nintendo for years on the Nintendo Minute series, said that while the job sure had it's fair share of the "expected" stressors, they were quite happy with it and had almost nothing but good things to say.

If these contractors are telling legit stories though then I think the issue here is full time employees are treated better due to the fact upper management knows they'll stick around, while contractors are known to be only temporary so they don't get the same level of treatment as full timers. And this wouldn't be an issue with just NoA, I'm pretty sure I've heard similar stories from "temps" who worked for many different corporations in America.

BUT THAT SAID even if this event has lead to contractors coming forward to state that being temps for NoA isn't as cheery as being a full time employee, I still doubt the "innocence" of the person claiming they were fired over trying to form a union. It sounds like they got fired for legit reasons (breaking NDA) and made up the "union" excuse to get people on their side.

IGN has published an article about the growing frustrations with Nintendo of America.
Highlights include the possibility of being fired for taking a piss and the use of outdated technology. And the friendly exterior was just a facade. The demand for translators and localizers had increased, but there’s no full-time hires.

I’ll be blunt, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the customers will continue behaving the same as ever even after this story breaks through. A change in tastes would amount to nothing.