Amazon is planning to appeal Staten Island union’s victory

Amazon will reportedly object to a recent union election victory at its warehouse in Staten Island, alleging that organizers pressured workers into voting to organize. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company revealed its intention to appeal J…

Activision Blizzard gives 1,100 QA testers full-time jobs and higher base pay

Activision Blizzard is converting all of its temporary and contract quality assurance workers in the US to full-time employees starting on July 1st. Many of the 1,100 workers will receive a pay raise — the minimum hourly rate is going up to $20 per hour as of April 17th. As permanent employees, the workers will receive benefits and can participate in a bonus plan.

The company says bringing those workers on board as staff will bolster its development resources and increase its number of full-time employees by 25 percent. It recently converted nearly 500 other temp and contract roles across its studios to full-time positions.

The move comes in the wake of a unionization drive spearheaded by QA team members at Raven Software. Workers from across Activision Blizzard staged a walkout in December after some Raven QA contractors were laid off. The following month, QA workers at the studio announced their intention to unionize, which would make them members of the first union at a AAA gaming company in North America.

Activision declined to voluntarily recognize the Game Workers Alliance union and shuffled some people to other departments. Executives also tried to convince workers not to form a union by questioning the benefits of organizing. Nevertheless, the Raven QA workers pressed forward with their plans and have filed for a union election through the National Labor Relations Board. 

“Whether Raven workers choose to unionize has nothing to do with the salary increases elsewhere for Activision’s QA workers,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg. The spokesperson added that Raven workers won’t be eligible for the pay initiatives “due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act.”

Microsoft, which has agreed a deal to buy the company for $68.7 billion, said last month it respected the right of Activision Blizzard employees “to choose whether to be represented by a labor organization and we will honor those decisions.”

Workers at Activision Blizzard have been pressuring leadership on other fronts. Many staged a walkout this week after it lifted COVID-19 vaccine requirements. The company clarified it would allow its studios to set their own return-to-office policies.

Elsewhere, the company is the subject of multiple ongoing harassment and misconduct lawsuits. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard last July, accusing the company of discrimination against female employees and fostering a “frat boy culture.” A wrongful death suit and a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit from an individual plaintiff have also been filed over the last month or so. Last week, a judge ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a federal suit that accused it of enabling a sexist and discriminatory environment.

Activision Blizzard isn’t the only major company in the gaming sector that’s hiring temp and contract QA workers into permanent roles. In February, Epic Games said it would offer most of its US-based QA workers full-time positions.

Here’s the full statement Activision Blizzard provided to Engadget:

Across Activision Blizzard, we are bringing more content to players across our franchises than ever before. As a result, we are refining how our teams work together to develop our games and deliver the best possible experiences for our players. We have ambitious plans for the future and our Quality Assurance (QA) team members are a critical part of our development efforts.

Therefore, today we announced the conversion of all US-based temporary and contingent QA team members at Activision Publishing (AP) and Blizzard — nearly 1,100 people in total — to permanent full-time employees starting July 1. Additionally, we are increasing the minimum hourly rate for these team members to $20/hr or more effective April 17. These employees also will be eligible to participate in the company’s bonus plan and will have access to full company benefits.

This change follows a process that began last year across AP and Blizzard of converting temporary and contingent employees, including 500 at AP’s studios, to permanent full-time employees.

Update 4/7 3:12PM ET: Added clarification about the impact on Raven workers.

Google Fiber workers successfully unionize in Kansas City

In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers — employed by staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions, which is subcontracted by Alphabet — voted nine to one to form a union. They’ll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA.)

Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. Kansas City was the market where Google Fiber first launched, approximately a decade ago. Workers at this store skipped straight to petitioning the NLRB for union recognition because, for reasons unknown, the supermajority of union card-signers were seemingly ignored by Google and BDS alike. At the time Emrys Adair, a worker at this location said, “There’s been no acknowledgement, no pushback. No response at all yet.” Since then neither company responded to Engadget’s requests for comment.

Among the ballots cast, nine were in favor while one was opposed; an additional ballot was challenged, but the number of challenged ballots was not sufficient to change the result of the election. 

“Our campaign faced many efforts to discourage us from exercising our right to a collective voice on the job. Yet it was always clear to all of us that together we can positively shape our working conditions to ensure we all have access to the quality pay, benefits and protections we have earned,” Eris Derickson, one of the retail associate at this location, told press in a statement today. “We all enjoy our work with Google Fiber and look forward to sitting at the negotiating table with BDS Connected Solution to set a new standard for our workplace to improve both worker, customer and company experience.” 

The Alphabet Workers Union sees this not only as a victory for this specific store, but part of a broader campaign to level the playing field between Alphabet’s full-time staff, and its larger and reportedly worse-compensated TVCs (temps, vendors and contractors, in Google parlance.) “Since our founding we have been committed to tackling Alphabet’s segregative, two-tiered employment system. Alphabet wants to maintain its reputation for treating its workers well but doesn’t want to pay for it. Instead, the trillion dollar corporation relies on temporary, contract and vendor workers to provide essential work for the company without the same pay, benefits or rights as full time employees,” Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a Google software engineer with AWU-CWA wrote in a statement today.

What remains next is for these Google Fiber workers to bargain their first contract, itself a herculean effort that companies have tremendous power to draw out or undermine. Thus far, the specific changes these workers hope to win in bargaining have not been disclosed by the AWU-CWA, though keeping those goals close to the chest is by no means unusual. 

Earlier this year, document discovery by the NLRB revealed the existence of an internal Google initiative called “Project Vivian.” As reported by Wired, the program was meant “to dissuade employees from unionizing after worker activism began heating up in late 2018”; and as it was put in the in documents themselves by Michael Pfyl, the company’s director of employment law, Project Vivian was intended “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.” 

Initially, workers had applied to have Alphabet and BDS considered joint employers in their unionization application. Hoping to avoid legal headaches and in the interest of an expedient vote, however, Alphabet were eventually dropped.

“We have many contracts with both unionized and non-union suppliers, and respect their employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “The decision of these contractors to join the Communications Workers of America is a matter between the workers and their employer, BDS Solutions Group.”

Correction: an earlier version of this story listed Alphabet as a joint employer. While initially filed as such with the NLRB, those terms changed over the past two months and we’ve updated to reflect that.