In what could be an industry-changing decision, quality assurance testers at Activision-Blizzard’s Raven Software officially voted to unionize this week with a final tally of 19-3 in favor of forming the union. This is the first workers’ union to form at a major video game developer in North America and will most likely help push the wider industry forward on this side of the globe. The video game industry has been plagued with stories of harassment, gender discrimination, bullying, and crunch over the past few years with Raven’s parent company Activision-Blizzard at the heart of some of the most detestable stories. The forming of this union should help reduce the overall number of those occurrences, while further protecting those who fall within it.
The push to form this union originally began back in late 2021 when about a dozen quality assurance employees were told that their contracts would not be renewed, despite Call of Duty: Warzone (the game they were working on at the time) being a huge success. The team of QA workers went on to organize walkouts and strikes before eventually forming the “Game Worker’s Alliance” in early 2021. Activision-Blizzard continued to try to [what I would consider] passive aggressively fight the efforts of the workers before the National Labor Relations Board stepped in this Spring stating that the workers at Raven could move forward with their vote to unionize.
While the vote in favor has cleared, there is still a lot of work to be done. The next step in the process is to draft up and negotiate a contract that will most likely argue for higher wages, better benefits, job security, work-life balance, and much more. While this won’t necessarily minimize the work ahead, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has stated that Microsoft will recognize Raven Software’s union after their acquisition of Activision-Blizzard closes.
Image from: Raven Software
