Employees at Activision Blizzard have formed the ABK Worker Alliance, which is asking all of their supporters to donate to a strike fund with regards to the work stoppage after the recent layoffs were announced. It’s the latest step in a lengthy campaign against the company’s management’s response to months of lawsuits as well as various reports concerning the widespread discrimination and sexual harassment incidents.
On Twitter, the ABK Workers Alliance said, “Today, the ABK Worker’s Alliance announces the starting of its strike.” “We invite our partners in the game industry to join us in bringing about long-term change.” The ABK Worker Alliance has also set up a GoFundMe strike fund, asking for donations to assist them to gather $1 million to care for staff throughout the strike.
According to Shannon Liao of the Washington Post, the ABK Worker Alliance will also be requesting signatures on union authorization cards from employees across Activision Blizzard in a new huge step toward organized labor in partnership with the Communications Workers of America.
These fresh strikes come after quality assurance testers at Raven Software, the studio behind Call of Duty: Warzone, went on strike earlier this week to protest recent layoffs. While 500 contractors across Activision Blizzard will be transitioned to full-time, the firm has announced that 20 would be laid off near the end of January, a move Raven experts believe could harm Warzone’s ongoing development and maintenance. As the week continued, more than 60 QA personnel and other developers from various locations joined the walkout, and those currently involved, according to The Washington Post, are no longer being paid.
It’s unknown how many people will be affected by the broader work stoppage declared by the ABK Workers Alliance today. After a sensational report by The Wall Street Journal implicated him in the publisher’s prior abuse and toxic working culture, over 1,500 employees at the roughly 10,000-person company signed a letter asking CEO Bobby Kotick to go. “If I lose my job because of unionization, OK,” one striking employee told Polygon, “but I’d rather make this place worth working in.”
Christine, a Blizzard employee, held a news conference outside the Irvine headquarters yesterday, recounting how she was grabbed and sexually propositioned by superiors, and then demoted after reporting the misconduct to HR. Activision Blizzard’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom, has asked the company to increase a previously disclosed $18 million deal with federal regulators to a $100 million fund for victims.
