Since a group of 34 QA testers at Raven Software voted to unionize earlier this month, the studio’s parent company, Activision Blizzard, has been taking steps that will undermine that support and make it harder for workers to organize. This morning, Activision’s VP of QA Chris Arends sent the clearest message yet about where executives stand on the unionization effort, and to no one’s surprise, they’re firmly against it.
In a locked internal Slack channel Monday morning, Arends asked herself six questions about the potential union and provided answers for employees from Activision’s point of view, as union organizer Jessica Gonzalez shared on Twitter. Employees were unable to respond to the message. Each answer diminished the benefits of unionization, but the fourth point warned of the more explicit dismantling of the organizing process.
It has basically been a Proclamation against the possibility of creating a trade union. They thus seek to discourage workers from defending their labor rights. Among Arends’s proclamations are messages such as “we work to create epic games internationally (…) and a union will not help us to achieve it.” Along the way he forgets the incredible tensions that the company’s workers have experienced. On the one hand there have been suicides due to the harassment of the women of the same, but they have also been forced to work for endless hours.