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~ 600 Activision QA Workers Unionize under CWA. MS agreed to recognize.

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tentacle-tropes

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BREAKING - Around 600 Activision QA workers are unionizing under the Communication Workers of America, making it the largest union in North American game development. Activision owner Microsoft voluntarily agreed to recognize the union, per the CWA.
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After all the layoffs this is certainly some good news.
 
This would not happen under Kotick leadership.

There's pros and cons in the merger. This was a big pro.
 
Still insane to me that companies have to "recognize" unions in the US. Here a company is forced into abiding to the union that represents the workers in any specific field.

Like, a hotel can't choose to not follow what's decided by the hotel worker's union. If they don't follow the agreed upon minimum wage, yearly raises, benefits, etc. they get investigated, fined and forced to comply in court.
 
I heard, but do not know for certain, that this would be Microsoft's first union in the USA region.

I'm not going to pretend that this alone justifies all that has transpired in the ABK buyout and beyond, but it almost does. Hopefully, this will quickly have knock-on effects for the rest of gamedev.
 
Remember_spinal said:
they pretty much had to agree to it by law. I doubt the rest of MS will get the same treatment
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Not in the US, laws and enforcement vary by state and even municipality. Look at Amazon to see what an adversarial corp can achieve in stalling or blocking unionization.

Microsoft's non-engagement agreement with the CWA is company wide I believe.
 
This is great news, lots of people at Activision move from QA to developers and their high turnover was caused by how exausthing and toxic the environment was, if the Union raises the working conditions less people will leave, alleviating the need for support studios and improving the overall quality of the games. This is only a stepping stone, but it's a good one. I hope MS took the allegations seriously and let go of the most problematic managers, I don't expect them to release a PR saying "we fired all the sexual abusers and toxic employees" because it could lead to lawsuits and you never really know if you removed them all, but I think it's a needed intervention that wouldn't undermine the underlying independence of each CoD studio.
 
Belthazar said:
Still insane to me that companies have to "recognize" unions in the US. Here a company is forced into abiding to the union that represents the workers in any specific field.

Like, a hotel can't choose to not follow what's decided by the hotel worker's union. If they don't follow the agreed upon minimum wage, yearly raises, benefits, etc. they get investigated, fined and forced to comply in court.
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This is a little different. Rather than being about whether they will follow the negotiated agreement, it's about whether they accept a newly-formed union's authority to negotiate on behalf of a group of workers. Voluntary recognition generally means the process was amicable and less formal - a series of conversations until reaching an agreement. If the employer doesn't voluntarily recognize the union, it has to go through a longer legal process to substantiate the claim that the workers do in fact want to transfer their own negotiation power to a union representative, and union busters will typically try to jam up that process and intimidate employees to discourage them from supporting the effort, in the hopes that the union won't be able to satisfy the legal requirements and will fail to be established.
 
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