High quality Assurance employees at Blizzard Albany, previously Vicarious Visions, voted to unionize their division on Friday, with 14 votes for and none towards of the eligible 18 members of the unit (credit score to Polygon (opens in new tab).) Recreation Staff Alliance Albany is the second QA unit at an Activision Blizzard-owned developer to unionize, following within the footsteps of Raven QA’s profitable push (opens in new tab) this previous Summer season.
The victory got here simply two days after the Nationwide Labor Relations Board dominated towards Activision Blizzard’s movement (opens in new tab) to delay the vote. Activision Blizzard argued, because it had within the run as much as the Raven QA vote, that any query of unionization ought to apply to the entire studio versus a single division.
GWA Albany argued, and the NLRB agreed, that there are sufficient variations in pay, therapy, and the character of their work that the QA employees had ample floor to unionize impartial of different departments.
GWA Albany will subsequent transfer to contract negotiations, a stage Raven QA stays mired in. Originally of November, Kotaku (opens in new tab) reported on the state of negotiations, notably Activision Blizzard’s insistence on not awarding Raven QA employees a pay enhance granted to the corporate’s different QA models again in April.
Activision Blizzard and Starbucks (opens in new tab) have each withheld basic pay raises from union workplaces, citing labor regulation drafted to make sure employers couldn’t sway union drives with adjustments to pay. The Washington Put up (opens in new tab) reported in October that the NLRB discovered this to be retaliation for union exercise in Raven Software program’s case.
Future gamers could acknowledge the Vicarious Visions title—below its former moniker, Blizzard Albany was a key help studio for Bungie that, amongst different contributions, spearheaded the PC port of Future 2. Blizzard Albany is presently engaged on the upcoming Diablo 4.