Over 500 Blizzard Entertainment employees have formed a wall-to-wall union under the umbrella of the Communication Workers of America.
As reported by Game Developer, the new union is named World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild (WoWGG-CWA) and spans the whole World of Warcraft development team.
This includes developers from all departments, from designers to QA. Speaking of Quality Assurance, 60 Blizzard QA Testers in Austin, Texas, also formed another unit named Texas Blizzard QA United-CWA at the same time.
Blizzard senior software engineer Kevin Vigue provided a comment.
“By forming a cross-disciplinary union, we seek to enshrine that value and ensure that the developers of World of Warcraft, QA included, will always have a voice in our own workplace.
We want to both improve our working conditions and protect the things we love about Blizzard, all so we can feel secure in pouring our talents and passion into making World of Warcraft.”
We also hear that the unionization effort started before the recent layoffs that saw a massive number of developers let go across Microsoft’s teams, but witnessing that event solidified the awareness of the importance of unionization in the gaming industry, to minimize the impact of layoffs and ensure retention of talent.
The next step of the union will be to elect a bargaining committee and survey its members to identify the issues it needs to prioritize. Vigue explained that probable relevant topics will be “layoff protections, improved work-from-home policies, transparency around performance and promotions, and pay adjustments to align with the expensive areas we live.”
The workers at Blizzard Entertainment, which was acquired by Microsoft alongside Activision and King with a $68.7 billion transaction finalized last year, were able to achieve this extraordinary unionization result thanks to a deal signed last year between the tech giant and the CWA.
As part of that deal, Microsoft pledged not to interfere with unionization efforts among its employees.
