About 600 workers at Activision Publishing, the video game maker owned by Microsoft, have unionized, forming the largest video game labor union in the United States, the Communications Workers of America said Friday. Microsoft recognized the union after the vote count was complete.
The employees work in quality assurance, testing Activision games for bugs, glitches and other defects, and 390 of them voted to form a union, while eight opposed the effort, the union said. . About 200 workers did not vote.
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty and other blockbusters, for $69 billion in October. As part of its long effort to convince regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft signed a first-of-its-kind industry agreement to remain neutral if workers want to unionize in the CWA
Managers are trained not to express an opinion about whether the union is good or bad, and the CWA said Activision management supported the agreement and did not interfere with workers’ organizing efforts.
“That was, organizing-wise, a huge boon,” said Kara Fannon, a union organizing committee member who works for Activision near Minneapolis. “It helped a lot of people who were worried about union busting or potential retaliation.”
The new union is Activision’s first since the agreement took effect.
“Microsoft’s selection will strengthen the company’s culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry,” CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement.
The largest group of employees is in Minnesota, though the union also has offices in Texas and California. The union’s hopes include negotiating higher wages, improving job security and providing more development opportunities for quality assurance testers, who perform some of the lowest-paid game development work.
The agreement also means that workers can avoid the long and often contentious process of petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for an election. Instead, they used an expedited process, in which workers indicated their support or opposition for the union by signing a union authorization card or voting confidentially online on a portal that opened on Feb. 22 and closed on Thursday afternoon. A third-party arbiter, Fred Horowitz, verified the results.
After the vote was counted, Amy Pannoni, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement that the company looks forward to “continuing our positive relationship with labor management,” and that it recognizes the CWA “as the representative of bargaining for Activision Publishing’s central quality assurance employees.”
Activision workers have been organizing since at least 2021, when employees across the company staged a walkout after a California civil rights agency sued the company for sexual misconduct in the workplace. work. (The company it’s okay the case on a narrower basis last year.) Over time, labor organizing focused on unionization, in support of the CWA
Workers also saw a successful effort last year to unionize ZeniMax Media, a video game company also owned by Microsoft, which expanded its neutrality pact to cover any of the other video studios. game it owns. In January 2023, about 300 workers at ZeniMax, whose Bethesda Game Studios produced such hits as The Elder Scrolls, voted to unionize through a new and expedited process.
After Friday’s results, the CWA now represents more than 1,000 video game workers at Microsoft.
The video game industry has been rocked by a series of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures for more than a year. said Ms. Fannon said getting better layoff protections, such as improved severance, was a common concern among workers even before Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs in its video game division in January, including many layoffs at Activision.
