This week employees on Blizzard’s “Story and Franchise Improvement” workforce “strongly voted” to affix America’s largest communications and media labor union, the Communications Staff of America.From the union’s announcement:
The Story and Franchise Improvement workforce is Blizzard’s in-house cinematics, animation, and narrative workforce, producing the trailers, promotional movies, in-game cutscenes, and different narrative content material for Blizzard franchises — in addition to franchise archival employees and historians. These employees would be the first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to type a union within the North American sport trade, becoming a member of practically 3,000 employees at Microsoft-owned studios who’ve organized with CWA to construct higher requirements throughout the online game trade after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023…The announcement is the most recent replace in organizing the tech and online game trade, as over 6,000 employees in the USA and Canada have organized with the Marketing campaign to Set up Digital Staff (CODE-CWA) since launching over 5 years in the past. Final week, employees at Raven Software program secured a historic contract with Microsoft, becoming a member of ZeniMax QA builders at CWA, who additionally secured a contract with the corporate in June. “CWA says that Blizzard proprietor Microsoft has acknowledged the union,” studies the gaming information website Aftermath, in accordance with the labor neutrality coverage Microsoft agreed to in 2022, resulting in a number of different union sport studios at Microsoft:
In July 2024, 500 employees on Blizzard-owned World of Warcraft shaped a union that they referred to as “the biggest wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio,” alongside Blizzard QA employees in Austin. Different studios throughout Microsoft have additionally unionized lately, together with at Bethesda, ZeniMax On-line Studios, and ZeniMax QA, the latter of which lastly reached a contract in Might after practically two years of bargaining. Unionized employees 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 am excited that we’ve got joined collectively in forming a union to guard my colleagues from issues like misguided insurance policies and instability because of layoffs.”
