The new union affects only a small group of workers — 28 quality assurance workers at Activision’s Raven studio.
A group of workers at a video game studio that is part of Activision Blizzard has voted to form a union, a first for a major North American video game company. The vote, which passed 19 to 3, affects 28 quality-assurance employees at Raven Software, the Wisconsin studio that helps to develop the popular Call of Duty game. The workers voted over the past several weeks and the results were tallied by the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. Activision has one week to formally object if it finds grounds for complaint. The new union, the Game Workers Alliance, is the culmination of months of labor organizing at Activision, which has faced increasing pressure from employees to improve working conditions after a lawsuit accused the company of having a sexist culture in which women were routinely harassed. Organizing at Raven in particular increased in intensity in December, when quality assurance, or Q.A., workers walked out to protest the ending of about a dozen workers’ contracts.
