The QA team at Blizzard Albany has voted to form a Communications Workers of America union called Albany Game Workers Alliance, much like their Raven Studio counterparts. Blizzard Albany, formerly known as Vicarious Visions until April 2022, filed a ruling with the National Labor Relations Board and sought recognition from Activision Blizzard on July 14 before posting the news on Twitter and explaining its reasons for choosing the Washington Post. .
The new union listed several topics it hopes to address on Twitter, including fair wages and transparency, better benefits, better communication, and work-life balance. The union said it hopes the move is important in ensuring industry quality assurance teams are respected and rewarded based on their role in the game’s development process.
“I firmly believe that the union will give us the strength we need to improve our workplace,” Amanda Levene, a junior testing analyst at Blizzard Albany, told The Washington Post. “It is very exciting to launch this and I hope that we can inspire others in the same way that Raven, Starbucks, Amazon and all the unions that came before us have inspired us.”
Levene also said that seeing Raven’s attempts helped “demystify” the process, giving Blizzard Albany a better idea of what to expect from the process and the company. So far, Blizzard has not publicly commented on union recognition or rejection. However, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company will soon provide a public and official response to the NLRB.
Whether the company decides to voluntarily acknowledge the Blizzard Albany alliance is largely irrelevant, at least from a practical standpoint. US labor law required Activision Blizzard to recognize and bargain with the QA Raven union by early 2022, though that didn’t stop the company from retaliating by denying union members the right to pay raises.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Microsoft said it would acknowledge all partnerships and deals made following final confirmation of its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Source : PC Gamesn
