Blizzard Tester’s Union Vote Allowed To Go Ahead, NLRB Rules

Back in July, A group of 21 quality assurance workers at Activision’s Albany studio (formerly known as Vicarious Visions) have announced their intention to form a union.Today, the National Labor Relations Board confirmed that the vote can go forward.

The reason for the judgment was—Stop me if you’ve heard this before— Publisher Activision Blizzard initially opposed the move, saying a larger group of 88 developers should be included in the vote. Tried by other Activision studios going through the unionization process.

In this case it didn’t work. His NLRB ruling today paved the way for workers to vote to form a union, and his I disagree with Activision’s claims. Albany, working on Diablo, should have a direct say in this decision. “

The ruling concludes:

From the above, we conclude that the employees of the petitioning department share a community of interest. We also looked at the similarities that existed between developers and compared this to our testers. The developers are organized in separate departments, but ultimately Diablo is the department that reports to the head of the franchise. Developers have a variety of skills, training, and responsibilities, but use these skills in complementary ways to enable production processes involving high volume contact and high degree of functional integration. Compensation varies, but many terms of employment overlap between developers.

Comparing the developer’s community of interest with the tester’s interest shows that the tester’s explicit interest is more important than the similarities with the developer. As previously mentioned, testers participate in the same game development process, including critical contact and feature integration. However, the testers are individually organized in their own division, and their directorial hierarchy is completely separate from Diablo’s franchise. Testers also have a specific set of skills and duties that differ from developers. Finally, testers are paid significantly less than developers. Moreover, the evidence of exchanges between testers and developers is very limited. For these reasons, we have found that the common interests between testers and developers do not outweigh the individual interests of making petitioned units suitable.

The verdict immediately clears the way for elections to begin soon. Ballots will be mailed out for him on October 27th and votes will be tallied for him on November 18th.

Although not the testers who participated in the vote, current employees of the studio said to washington post “It’s about time. Our QA testers are some of the most talented and skilled people working at our company and are greatly underestimated by the company. I believe all game workers need a union.” but QA is especially desperately needed.”

Updated at 10:00 PM ET: Lulu Cheng Meservey, executive vice president of corporate affairs and chief communications officer at Activision Blizzard, commented on the internal communications survey results. write in:

Guys, take note of the important things right away.It’s long but I want to be thorough Thank you for staying with me. This afternoon, the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) determined that the -20 QA (Quality Assurance) testers working on Diablo in Albany are eligible to unionize, and if the union wins, the vote will be negotiated. included in the unit.

Company position: We fully respect the NLRB process and fully support the right of employees to choose how they want to be represented. We also have the view that those who work closely should be able to make such decisions collectively. In other words, I disagree that a few employees should decide for everyone else the future of Albany as a whole.Diablo team based. We believe that direct dialogue between the company and employees is the most productive way.

Example: Through direct dialogue, we have already converted temporary QA staff to full-time, raised salaries, increased benefits, opened access to bonus programs, and provided professional advancement opportunities. (This also increases your salary).

Collective bargaining feels relatively slow, according to Bloomberg analysis. During long-term contract negotiations, companies cannot offer salary/bonus/benefit increases without specific arrangements with unions, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that non-unionized employees are generally not represented by unions. This is consistent with what we have seen at Raven, which has only had three negotiating sessions since the union was recognized about six months ago. I’m here.

I am sharing all of that because having a streamlined process is why the company likes direct discussions.

What happens next is that ballots are mailed to eligible Albany-based employees on October 27th, must be returned by November 17th, and counted by the NLRB on November 18th. is to be

There’s more to come as the process continues, but I wanted to share as soon as possible.