Blizzard employees set to walkout
Employees at Activision Blizzard are calling for a walkout on Wednesday in Irvine to protest the company’s responses to a recent sexual discrimination lawsuit and demanding more equitable treatment for underrepresented staff.
Last week, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the publisher behind games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, detailing alleged incidents of sexual harassment and assault and a culture in which women faced unequal pay and retaliation. Activision called the allegations false and distorted in a statement last week, and Fran Townsend, executive vice president for corporate affairs, sent a letter to staff echoing that claim and describing the suit’s claims as “factually incorrect, old and out-of-context.”
Infuriated Activision employees have spoken out on social media, and more than 2,000 staff signed an open letter calling the company’s responses “abhorrent and insulting.” Now they’re planning a strike.
The walkout is being organized by a group of employees at Blizzard Entertainment, where the majority of the lawsuit’s allegations were focused.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the workers said their goal was to “improve conditions for employees at the company, especially women, and in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups.”
The strike will take place outside of Blizzard’s campus in Irvine
“Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action — and the troubling official responses that followed — we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests,” the letter says. “To claim this is a ‘truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,’ while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable.”
The employees are demanding:
• That Activision ditch mandatory arbitration clauses “in all employee contracts, current and future.”
• New practices for recruiting, interviewing, hiring and promotion that facilitate better representation “agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization.”
• The publication of data on relative compensation, promotion rates and salary ranges for employees “of all genders and ethnicities at the company.”
• That a diversity task force be allowed to hire a third party to audit the company’s leadership, hierarchy and HR department. “It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.”
This is the second major organizing effort from Blizzard in about the past 12 months. Last year employees shared their salaries on a public spreadsheet and sent a letter of demands to management to ask for more equitable compensation. That action led to very little response, employees said.
Collective action is rare in the video-game industry, which has no unions in North America. A representative for the Blizzard employees organizing this walkout said they were not currently discussing unionizing.