About 600 employees are joining Microsoft-owned Activision
About 600 workers at Activision Publishing, Microsoft’s video game maker, have unionized to form the largest video game union in the United States, the Communications Workers of America said Friday. Microsoft recognized the union after the vote counting was completed.
The employees are involved in quality assurance and test Activision’s games for bugs, glitches and other defects. 390 of them voted in favor of forming a union, while eight opposed the effort, the union said. About 200 workers did not vote.
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, the maker of Call of Duty and other blockbusters, for $69 billion in October. As part of its long-running effort to convince regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft signed an industry-first pact to remain neutral if employees wanted to join the CWA.
Managers were trained not to express opinions on whether unionization was good or bad, and the CWA said Activision management enforced the pact and did not interfere with workers’ organizing efforts.
“That’s been a huge organizational boon,” said Kara Fannon, a union organizing committee member who works for Activision near Minneapolis. “It has helped many people who were concerned about the union breaking up or possible retaliation.”
The new union is the first at Activision since the pact went into 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’s president, Claude Cummings Jr., said in a statement.
The largest group of employees is in Minnesota, although the union also includes offices in Texas and California. The union’s hopes include negotiating higher wages, improving job security and providing more advancement opportunities for quality assurance testers, who are among the lowest-paid jobs in game development.
The pact also meant that workers could bypass the lengthy and often controversial process of petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for elections. Instead, they used an expedited process, in which employees signaled their support or opposition for the union by signing a union authorization card or voting confidentially online in a portal that opened Feb. 22 and closed Thursday afternoon. An outside referee, Fred Horowitz, verified the results.
After the votes were counted, Amy Pannoni, deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement that the company looks forward to “continuing our positive labor-management relationship” and that it recognizes CWA “as the bargaining representative for Activision Publishing’s central quality organization.” security workers.”
Employees have been organizing at Activision since at least 2021, when employees across the company staged a strike after a California civil rights group sued the company for workplace sexual misconduct. (Company organized Last year this was the case on more limited grounds.) Over time, workers’ organizations turned to unionization, with the support of the CWA
The workers also saw last year’s successful attempt to unionize at ZeniMax Media, a video game company also owned by Microsoft, which had extended its neutrality pact to all other video game studios it owned. In January 2023, about 300 employees at ZeniMax, whose Bethesda Game Studios makes hits like The Elder Scrolls, voted to unionize through the new, expedited process.
Following Friday’s results, the CWA now represents more than 1,000 video game employees at Microsoft.
The video game industry has been plagued by a series of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures for more than a year. Ms. Fannon said getting better job protections, such as better severance pay, is a common concern among employees even before Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs in its video game division in January, including many layoffs at Activision.