Activision Blizzard subsidiary wins union vote
The Game Workers Alliance, the union of quality assurance workers at Activision subsidiary studio Raven Software, has won their union vote. The votes were tallied today and the union passed with 19 out of 22 votes with two challenged ballots. The election makes the Game Workers Alliance (GWA) the first union for Activision Blizzard and only the second formal union in US video game industry.
Happy union day! We won! pic.twitter.com/nzJ4A3J3RB
The vote is the culmination of months of organizing and a seeming concerted effort of union-busting on behalf of Activision Blizzard. In December, after 12 QA employees were informed they would be laid off in January, QA workers staged a walkout that morphed into a five-week-long strike at the Wisconsin-based Call of Duty support studio. At the end of that strike, the remaining QA workers formed the Game Workers Alliance in partnership with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
Activision Blizzard was persistent in its attempts to stymie the unionization movement. Days after the GWA formed, Raven QA employees were broken out of their single department and distributed across multiple teams. The company also failed to voluntarily recognize the GWA, triggering the election process. During that time, the company petitioned the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to determine that the voting unit be composed of Raven Software employees instead of just the QA workers trying to unionize, which could have potentially diluted the majority needed to formally elect a union.
In April of this year, Activision Blizzard converted over 1,000 temporary and contract employees to full time and granted them a minimum base pay starting at $20 / hr. Although all of the QA employees at Raven had
Read more on theverge.com
