Microsoft home to the largest video game union in the US

Despite deeps cuts to its gaming work force recently, Microsoft has now become home to the largest video game collective bargaining effort in the United States with 600 Quality Assurance workers from Activision Blizzard unionized.

Early on during its initial attempts to court regulators over the Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft gained the approval of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) by signing a labor neutrality agreement acknowledging ABK QA employees’ efforts to unionize.

While not our right support of the union labor effort, Microsoft’s LNA contract represented the company’s neutrality towards ongoing attempts and furthermore, stood as sign the company would not engage in any underhanded union-busting efforts like other companies or administrations.

Under former CEO Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard and its board had stalled efforts from its QA departments to unionize and gain barging representation within the company.

However, the long road to unionization is over for roughly 600 Activision QA personnel across studios in Austin, Texas; Eden Prairie, Minnesota; and El Segundo, California, as they tallied the final votes of 390 to 8 in favor of creating a union.

Several Activision QA spoke with Polygon following the unionization victory.

“Something we organized around is that in this industry, QA and customer service are the lowest paid jobs, and often looked down upon either within the industry or by customers,” Activision QA tester and organizing committee member Kara Fannon told Polygon. “It’s easy for people to say to QA, ‘Oh, I found a bug,’ even though we logged tens of thousands of bugs. So why is QA [unionizing], as opposed to other people in the industry? We have the weakest protections currently and we want to make sure that we’re strong so our work can keep going the way it is — we want to be supporting these games and working really hard on them.”

The newly minted 600 QA union workers from Activision Blizzard will join other unionized departments within Activision, Microsoft, ZeniMax, and Raven Software to form the single largest unionized force in gaming in the US now.

The CWA’s effort to help Activision QA employees gain representation comes at a pivotal time for workers in gaming which has taken blows over the past year with thousands being let go every few months.

Being part of a union may not guarantee work in the future, it can help mitigate losses both financially and to careers with negotiations around severance packages, non-compete clauses, and mandatory-minimum inform statues.

With the unionization vote out of the way, Activision’s QA union now preps for another tough battle with Microsoft negotiators over terms for a new contract. It is unclear what the period is for negotiations or when it’s set to begin.

Microsoft has had no comment on recent developments as of now.