Microsoft Says It Will Work With Employee Unions

gamerant.com:

Unions in the tech industry are a hot-button issue and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Amazon’s anti-unionization efforts are the most widely known, with Activision Blizzard also having just faced its own union dispute. However, tech and gaming giant Microsoft has so far avoided any direct controversies.

Recent statements from Microsoft’s gaming division already indicated that the company is hoping to avoid an openly antagonistic relationship with any current or future tech unions. That sentiment has now been mirrored by the rest of the company, with President Brad Smith pledging to cooperate with unions organized by their employees.

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“Our employees will never need to organize to have a dialogue with Microsoft’s leaders,” Smith said in a blog post earlier today. However, he recognized that cultural and technological changes are altering how people think about the way they work and their relationships with their employers. He also noted that unionization campaigns are likely to continue, and it’s only a matter of time until Microsoft employees begin organizing as well. Thus, the company’s management has decided to take proactive steps to create a more constructive relationship between Microsoft and labor unions. “We’re not asking our employees to go form a union,” Smith told a reporter from Axios, “but we will meet people where they are at.”

Smith’s blog post laid out the two primary factors that guided Microsoft’s thinking. The first is that Microsoft acknowledges it only has limited experience interacting with unions. Xbox head Phil Spencer previously said something similar regarding Raven Software, which recently became the first