Activision Blizzard: Raven Successfully Forms a Union – News

At Raven Software, a community of quality assurance employees voted to establish a union under the umbrella of the Communications Workers of America. It will be the first union at a publicly traded US developer, like Bloomberg reported.

Developer Raven Software now supports other studios in the development and maintenance of Activision Blizzard Call of Duty – Warzone and the multiplayer modes of the CoD series. The interest group was founded after a wave of layoffs in the Quality Assurance department in December 2021, but was not recognized by the management of Activision and Raven. According to documents and videos that Bloomberg management had attempted to persuade the relevant employees to vote against the formation of the union. Messages were sent out that stated, among other things, that unions do not guarantee better pay. A spokesman for Activision said that such an important decision for all 350 employees at Raven Software should not be made by 19 of them. On the day of the vote, the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor law compliance, concluded that Activision Blizzard had violated employees’ rights by illegally threatening them and forcing social media restrictions on them.

Working conditions in the video game industry have received increasing attention in recent years, including in the form of criticism of the crunch culture and coming to terms with the sexism and other types of toxic corporate culture that have dominated the Activision Blizzard headlines for the past year.