Around 600 workers in Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed a union. Assisted by the Communications Workers of America, the employees completed their vote with the results certified on Friday, March 8th. With that, Activision Quality Assurance United – CWA becomes the latest union to arise out of Microsoft’s gaming division and the largest video game union in the United States, The Verge reported.
According to The Verge, in 2022, Microsoft affirmed a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA which eases the organization process at the company and its subsidiaries including Activision Blizzard.
In an interview with The Verge, Tom Shelly, a technical requirements specialist and one of Activision Quality Assurance United’s organizers, said the labor neutrality agreement and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year made their goals of unionizing easier to accomplish.
In quality assurance, workers test game looking for bugs and other issues, flagging them for other developers to fix. Since the majority of QA jobs are typically entry level, the industry has a reputation for devaluing these roles, emphasizing the need for labor protections.
Polygon reported hundreds of Activision quality assurance workers are unionizing with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The union covers approximately 600 Activision central QA workers across three locations: Austin, Texas; Eden Prairie, Minn.; and El Segundo, Calif. This makes the union, called Activision Quality Assurance Unite – CWA, the largest group of unionized video game workers in the U.S.
The final vote is tallied at 390 votes “yes” and eight votes “no,” a CWA representative told Polygon.
Activision Quality Assurance United – CWA members work on games published by Activision Publishing, including franchises like Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, and Tony Hawk Pro Skater. The group joined unionized Microsoft and Activision Blizzard employees at Blizzard Albany, Raven Software, and ZeniMax.
According to Polygon, the other positive is that neither Activision’s QA workers nor Microsoft management have to go through the union election process with the National Labor Relations Board, which can sometimes take a while. Instead, Activision QA workers have been voting since Feb. 22, with either a union authorization card (a document, physical or digital, indicating approval of the union) or a confidential vote through an online portal.
IGN provided a quote from CWA: “The CWA Labor Neutrality Agreement is a historic agreement and unprecedented at a tech company of Microsoft’s size. By recognizing our union, Microsoft is making good on its promise to respect our ability to decide for ourselves about union representation. We encountered no union-busting at a time when most US companies – especially tech companies – regularly spend millions on anti-union consultants to prevent workers from speaking up for themselves. We hope this will inspire other workers to form unions and raise industry-wide expectations for pay, benefits, and respect for workers’ rights.”
In my opinion, those who work for huge tech companies should be allowed to form a union. It is wonderful that Microsoft chose not to interfere with the unionization efforts of Activision’s QA workers.