Will Raven devs have their QA teammates' backs? | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 28th January 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.
Last Friday, the ABK Workers Alliance and Communication Works of America asked Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize a union of Raven Software QA testers in light of the fact that 78% of eligible QA staff were already in favor of unionizing.
On Monday, they received an answer (more or less) as Raven Software studio head Brian Raffel told staff the company was restructuring, splitting up the QA team and embedding them within various other teams across the studio: production, art, engineering, etc. Raffel said the change had been in the works for months, and did not mention the union push.
The next day, Raffel directly addressed the question of unionization separately in an internal email, telling staff Raven expects the staff to take the matter to the National Labor Relations Board.
QUOTE | "The most important thing to the company is that each eligible employee has the opportunity to have their voice heard and their individual vote counted, and we think all employees at Raven should have a say in this decision." - Raffel's email suggested Raven would prefer a studio-wide vote on unionization, rather than a QA team-specific vote that the publisher already appears to have lost.
Raven QA staff is performing without a net
We already know Activision Blizzard doesn't want anything to do with a union, as chief administrative officer Brian Bulatao made clear last month when the CWA started distributing union cards to
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