Collective action gets results | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Friday 8th April 2022

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

There was some big news out of Activision Blizzard this week as the company announced that it would be converting all of its US-based QA contractors to full-time employees with benefits. Additionally, it will raise the minimum pay for QA to $20, following on from a November move that raised the pay floor to $17.

The interesting thing about the conversion to full-time is that it fulfills one of the demands made by the Raven QA workers who went on strike for nearly two months and are awaiting a National Labor Relations Board ruling on their efforts to unionize.

Naturally, we asked Activision Blizzard about whether it would be fulfilling the strikers' other major demand: to bring back contractors who were laid off in December and offer them full-time positions.

QUOTE | "This conversion of nearly 1,100 QA workers at Activision and Blizzard does not have any relation to the petition pending at Raven studio. The Raven situation is limited to Raven." - An Activision Blizzard representative's response.

Ah, ok, no relation at all. Got it. Interestingly, this latest act of corporate beneficence doesn't apply to the Raven workers who voted for unionization "due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act."

QUOTE | "It's especially galling then that Activision has excluded Raven Software QA workers, who have been at the forefront of this effort, from these benefits. The company's assertion that the National Labor Relations