Microsoft finds itself front and center of a unique unionization effort with over 500 Activision Blizzard employees associated with the World of Warcraft franchise voting to form the first interdisciplinary union.
The massive unionization efforts coalesced as the GameMakers Guild, a collaborative effort between the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and Blizzard engineers, designers, producers, artists, quality assurance, and other associates.
While Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement let the company step aside and allow for transparent unionization efforts, the organization now finds itself faced with a new and unique employee rights conservation. World of Warcraft’s new GameMakers Guild represents the first interdisciplinary union consisting of several different departments tasked with securing varying rights and privileges for their respective employee groups.
It is unclear how the GameMakers Guild will lobby and negotiate with Microsoft for the various concessions it’s looking to obtain for its members, but employees are claiming the union has “well above 50 percent [union support] in each specific department,” for future talks.
When speaking to The Verge about the initial effort to unionize, a senior quest designer by the name of Paul Cox explains, “A lot of the early responses felt very corporate and didn’t feel like they reflected the values that, as a company, we said we upheld.” Cox’s comments refer to Activision Blizzard’s response to a previous lawsuit between the company and the state of California regarding institutionalized discrimination within the organization.
While the initial discrimination lawsuit against Activision Blizzard was between the publishing studios and the state of California, the new World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild will cover over five hundred employees that work across both coasts for the game developer. Guild associates that work both at the California and Massachusetts offices form the second largest unionization effort at Activision, just behind the 600-member QA union formed during Microsoft’s courtship of the game publisher.
A third unionization effort is brewing among a smaller cohort of 60 or so employees from the Blizzard Austin, Texas QA department working titles such as Hearthstone and Diablo.
In recent years, Microsoft has been a more empathetic arbiter of union efforts in both internal and 3rd party contract negotiations and with regulators keenly watching its every move in the industry as of late, it’ll be interesting to see how it navigates upcoming requests.
