A group of Activision Blizzard workers vote to unionize

techcrunch.com:

After months of organizing, the quality assurance testers at Raven Software, a division of gaming giant Activision Blizzard, have voted to unionize. This marks the first union at a major gaming company in the U.S.

Administered through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the vote passed 19-3.

These workers announced their intent to unionize in December, just days after Microsoft announced its plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, which would be one of the largest tech acquisitions in history. But as the news of the pending acquisition went public, these quality assurance (QA) testers — who mostly work on Call of Duty — had been on strike for about five weeks, protesting the layoffs of 12 contractors.

“On December 3, about a third of my department was informed that their contracts were going to be terminated early. And this was coming off of a five-week stretch of overtime, consistent work,” Raven Software QA tester Onah Rongstad told TechCrunch at the time, explaining the intent to organize. “We realized in that moment that our day-to-day work and our crucial role in the games industry as QA was not being taken into consideration.”

This five-week stretch of overtime work that Rongstad describes is referred to as “crunch” in the gaming industry, which has been often cited as a huge cause of burnout and stress for gaming workers. The union, which goes by the name Game Workers Alliance and is represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), can now attempt to bargain with their employer to instate rules that circumvent “crunch” or unexpected layoffs.

But the problems run deeper at Activision Blizzard, which employs around 10,000 people. Following a two-year investigation, the state of California’s