In a press release highlighted by Cecilia D’Anastasio and Jason Scherier of Bloomberg, Activision Blizzard has unveiled converting the temporary contract of a thousand American contractors assigned to “Quality Assurance” into full-time permanent contracts, significantly increasing their salaries in the process. They were until then fixed-term employees and were destined to leave their position when their contract expired, but the tide seems to have turned in their favour!
After the effort, comfort for a thousand employees
For many years now, the video game publisher has been strongly criticized and singled out. The reason ? It largely exploits and even depends on thousands of part-time employees, paying little attention to their very precarious situation, especially on the side of the pole dedicated to Quality Assurance. It is also a fairly common practice in the video game industry, it even tends to expand year after year.
- Quality assurance : Simply put, a pole dedicated to (as the name suggests) ensuring that the end product is acceptable and salable. It is the employees of this section of Activision Blizzard who actually test most of the content available in your favorite video games before they are deployed to the general public.
Only here, while last December the firm converted 500 of these temporary jobs into full-time, it also put an end to 20 other temporary contracts to compensate. A large wave of indignation followed and many testers from the Raven Software studio (Call of Duty, Wolfenstein) chose to unionize to protest against these dismissals deemed abusive.
After weeks of struggle, it is finally 1,100 temporary workers who not only see their contract become full-time, instead of part-time, but they also benefit from an increase in their minimum wage which now stands at 20 dollars an hour. A huge step forward for those concerned! According to Bloomberg, this change would increase the number of employees in the dedicated game publishing branch of Activision by 25%!
The struggle continues for Raven Software
Unfortunately for Raven Software, the fight seems far from over. While one of the union’s spokespersons stated that “this change follows a process that began last year“Following this announcement in reference to the indignation of studio employees, Activision Blizzard does not seem to agree.
One of the publisher’s spokespersons has indeed announced that Raven workers will not benefit from these contract conversions “due to legal obligations under national labor relations law“. He finally added that “the fact that Raven workers are choosing to unionize has nothing to do with wage increases elsewhere for Activision QA workers“.
The union formed by Raven Software is to this day still not recognized by Activision Blizzard, and the National Labor Relations Council has not yet decided on this subject.
Following accusations of harassment that shook Activision Blizzard about a year ago, the studio was forced to react quickly to limit the damage. However, can a simple financial agreement be enough to make people forget the excesses pointed out? Not sure.