Reported by Stephen Totilo and Polygon, nearly 600 Activision quality assurance employees are unionising under “Communication Workers of America”, one of America’s largest unions and spans into Canada as well. This union was voluntarily recognised by the company’s owner Microsoft, making it the second game development union that the parent company has recognised under its leadership—as Microsoft has agreed to remain neutral in union proceedings, and this group joins Raven Software and Zenimax’s unions under the company.
The final vote is tallied at 390 votes “yes” and eight votes “no,” a CWA representative told Polygon.
“Something we organized around is that in this industry, QA and customer service are the lowest paid jobs, and often looked down upon either within the industry or by customers,” Activision QA tester and organizing committee member Kara Fannon told Polygon. “It’s easy for people to say to QA, ‘Oh, I found a bug,’ even though we logged tens of thousands of bugs. So why is QA [unionizing], as opposed to other people in the industry? We have the weakest protections currently and we want to make sure that we’re strong so our work can keep going the way it is — we want to be supporting these games and working really hard on them.”
Per Polygon.com
This announcement also comes on the backdrop of the Communications Workers of America endorsing Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard due to their neutral unionisation stance. With another union forming under Microsoft Gaming, it’s fair to say that more are likely to come—and in an industry where thousands are laid off on the regular, it can only mean rapid and better change for the gaming sphere as a whole.
I hope this is a start of big trend adopted industrywide.
Good news.
Finally some good industry news.