Raven Software QA Workers Are Officially Unionizing
The quality assurance team at Raven Software, one of the developers working on Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty franchise, is now officially unionizing with the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Now known as the Game Workers Alliance, Raven Software's QA workers are the first to form a unionized group under the umbrella of Activision Blizzard.
Working as part of the live team producing and maintaining Call of Duty titles (including Black Ops and Warzone, specifically), Raven Software's quality assurance workers had been having issues with Activision Blizzard for some time now. Namely, the company had been affected by the publisher's overbearing work culture and the refusal to renew contracts, which resulted in an ongoing QA strike as of early December.
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These ongoing issues have now come to a head, with 78% of the eligible QA workers at Raven Software supporting the unionization process. The new union - Game Workers Alliance - is the very first to announce their unionization of all the developers operating under Activision Blizzard, with the workers requesting for their publisher to voluntarily recognize their union with CWA. According to Raven's QA representatives, Activision Blizzard had previously refused to cooperate, and they are hoping that this does not continue to be the case moving forward.
As per CWA's claims, Activision Blizzard resorted to using various intimidation techniques in its previous communication with Raven's QA team, as well as surveillance tactics which include - but are not limited to - hiring union-busters. "We want to make sure that the passion from these workers is accurately reflected in our workplace and
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