Hey hey! Ho ho! Out of the CoD mines we will go!
The employees at Raven Software have finally ended their strike. Their push to form the first union from within a AAA developer may well be successful.
Said strike started in December of last year, when 60 employees and contractors from Raven Software’s QA department walked off the premises in protest of the lay offs of 12 of their fellow employees. If you’re not familiar with Raven, once upon a time they made amazing games. And then one of their games didn’t do as well as it was supposed to, so they were relegated to making DLC for fucking Call of Duty. And that made Civvie sad.
Anyway, Friday saw 34 workers from this strike who plan to unionize with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) requested Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize their union, the Game Workers Alliance. Activision Blizzard has until January 25th to do so. When asked for comment, the company stated that “Activision Blizzard is carefully reviewing the request for voluntary recognition from the CWA, which seeks to organize around three dozen of the company’s nearly 10,000 employees”.
Should Activision Blizzard fail to recognize the GWA, they’ll file for union election via the National Relations Board. The collective requires a supermajority of 78% in favor of unionization, and the 34-employee group will likely meetr that requirement, to do so without recognition from Activision Blizzard.
Considering the timing of all of this, it’s fantastic. Just last week, Microsoft announced that they’re buying Activision Blizzard. I guess now we know why all of the fingers on that monkey’s paw curled.
Source: Engadget
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