Activision Blizzard moves its US QA workers to full-time positions

destructoid.com:

Activision Blizzard is moving its U.S.-based QA workers into full-time roles. The company has announced that QA employees will become full-time, with full benefits, starting July 1.

QA employees at Activision Blizzard had previously pushed for this move, including those at Raven Software. The QA team at Raven held a strike, which ended with the team voting in favor of unionization.

Nearly 1,100 workers will be affected, which will push a pretty large number of workers into full-time roles at the company. Activision Blizzard is also raising its minimum hourly pay for these positions up to $20/hour, as of April 17. An Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Polygon that both Activision and Blizzard will continue to use external partner support for QA workers when workload exceeds the team’s bandwidth.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson tells Bloomberg that Raven workers, however, won’t receive new pay initiatives due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act. “Whether Raven workers choose to unionize has nothing to do with the salary increases elsewhere for Activision’s QA workers,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Moving QA workers into full-time roles was one of the Raven QA team’s original demands. That statement also includes a call to offer the same to several individuals who were laid off from the company last December. In a statement to GI Biz, an Activision Blizzard representative said the conversion of workers to full-time “does not have any relation to the petition pending at Raven studio.”

“The Raven situation is limited to Raven,” the spokesperson told GI Biz. “The testers whose contracts weren’t extended were welcome then, and now, to apply for any jobs at the company.”

It’s a step forward for