Raven Software’s QA team has filed to unionise with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after Activision Blizzard failed to meet their deadline for voluntarily recognising the union. Instead the Call of Duty: Warzone developer’s management has announced that the QA team will be reorganised within the studio, a move that could be seen as an attempt to make unionisation more difficult.
The Game Workers Alliance, as the team’s fledgling union is called, took to Twitter overnight with a statement:
We, the supermajority of workers at Raven QA, are proud to be confidently filing our petition with the NLRB for our union election.
We are deeply disappointed that Raven Software and Activision Blizzard refused to uplift workers rights by choosing to not voluntarily recognise our union in spite of our supermajority support.
This was an opportunity for Activision Blizzard to show a real commitment setting new and improved standards for workers. Instead, Activision Blizzard has chosen to make a rushed restructuring announcement to try and hinder our right to organize…
Once again, when management is given a choice, they always seem to take the low road.
However, we are proud to file with the NLRB as we enjoy supermajority support for our union and know that together, we will gain the formal legal recognition we have earned.
Activision also has their own comment, saying that they “deeply respect the rights of all employees to make their own decisions about whether or not to join a union. We carefully reviewed and considered the CWA initial request last week and tried to find a mutually acceptable solution with the CWA that would have led to an expedited election process. Unfortunately, the parties could not reach an agreement.”
We could speculate until the cows come home about what Activision Blizzard offered when talking to the CWA, but it’s boiled down to the same situation where they did not recognise the union as formed by the QA team. At the same time, Raven Software’s management chose to announce that the QA team would now be “embedded” across the studio instead of functioning as its own department. This is pretty common throughout the industry, with QA members working much more closely with developers, but… let’s just say that the timing is rather convenient and could be a tactic to undermine the QA team’s unionisation effort.
Raven’s QA team announced their unionisation bid at the end of last week, and brought to an end a strike that had run since early December. The striking and union was kicked into action by Activision’s decision to terminate a dozen QA tester contracts, despite them being in good standing within the company and having had previous assurances of continued work. Activision has taken an expected hardline in barely even acknowledging the strike, workers demands, and now the union. Meanwhile, Warzone players are already noticing a significant rise in the number of bugs and glitches present in the free-to-play game.
