Opinion: Why is an Activision exec tweeting through a labor dispute?
Activision Blizzard's labor dispute with QA workers at Blizzard Albany took a really weird turn this week. After the National Labor Relations Board gave the go-ahead for Game Workers Alliance Albany to hold a unionization vote (votes will be formally counted next month), newly-hired Activision Blizzard executive vice president of corporate affairs and chief communications officer (and former board member) Lulu Cheng Meservey took to a read-only Slack channel to address Blizzard Albany.
Images of Meservey's message would make their way to social media. She would follow them with a series of social media posts that seem misguided at best and antagonistic at worst.
Nothing she wrote will surprise readers who've followed Activision Blizzard's response to unionization efforts at the company. Meservey wrote that while Activision Blizzard respects the NLRB process, it has the view that "people who work closely together should be able to make decisions like that collectively," and that "a handful of employees" should not decide the future of Albany-area game developers working on the Diablo series.
"We think a direct dialogue between company and employees is the most productive route," Meservey said. It's the same argument the company has given to press in response to continued labor action at different branches of Activision Blizzard, and it seems so uniform across corporate America that you can hear it repeated by executives at Chipotle and Starbucks.
Given how we've heard these comments before by Activision Blizzard leadership, I personally didn't find the message that outrageous. But Meservey's conduct afterward caught me by surprise.
In response to a tweet from journalist Matt Binder, Meservey wrote the following: "I’m curious
Read more on gamedeveloper.com
