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Title: More Game Workers at Microsoft's 'Blizzard' Join a Union

Link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/08/17/062...

This week workers on Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development" team
"strongly voted" to join America's largest communications and media labor
union, the Communications Workers of America. From the union's announcement:
The Story and Franchise Development team is Blizzard's in-house cinematics,
animation, and narrative team, producing the trailers, promotional videos, in-
game cutscenes, and other narrative content for Blizzard franchises - as well
as franchise archival workers and historians. These workers will be the first
in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to form a union in the
North American game industry, joining nearly 3,000 workers at Microsoft-owned
studios who have organized with CWA to build better standards across the
video game industry after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023...
The announcement is the latest update in organizing the tech and video game
industry, as over 6,000 workers in the United States and Canada have
organized with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) since
launching over five years ago. Last week, workers at Raven Software secured a
historic contract with Microsoft, joining ZeniMax QA developers at CWA, who
also secured a contract with the company in June. "CWA says that Blizzard
owner Microsoft has recognized the union," reports the gaming news site
Aftermath, in accordance with the labor neutrality policy Microsoft agreed to
in 2022, leading to several other union game studios at Microsoft: In July
2024, 500 workers on Blizzard-owned World of Warcraft formed a union that
they called "the largest wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio,"
alongside Blizzard QA workers in Austin. Other studios across Microsoft have
also unionized in recent years, including at Bethesda, ZeniMax Online
Studios, and ZeniMax QA, the latter of which finally reached a contract in
May after nearly two years of bargaining. Unionized workers at Raven Studios
reached a contract with Microsoft earlier this month. The CWA's announcement
this week included this quote from one organizing committee member (and a
cinematic producer). "I'm excited that we have joined together in forming a
union to protect my colleagues from things like misguided policies and
instability as a result of layoffs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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