Activision Blizzard has been hit with multiple lawsuits alleging a sexist and discriminatory workplace culture. Activision Blizzard has been hit with multiple lawsuits alleging a sexist and discriminatory workplace culture. Workers in one division of Activision Blizzard, the major video game company behind popular franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Candy Crush, have voted to join the Communication Workers of America. The employees unionizing are 28 quality assurance testers at Raven Software, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. The final vote count was 19 votes in favor, 3 against.

The rules governing the union recognition process can change depending on which political party controls the White House. The Trump administration made it more difficult for employees to form so-called micro unions, arguing that workers could simply cherry-pick a group that was more likely to vote for a union. Trump's NLRB overturned an Obama-era precedent where the burden of proof had been on employers to show that workers excluded from a union vote shared enough in common to become included -- a hard task when job positions often differ in hours, wages and duties.

Immediately after work [in early December], we all got together, some people came over to my house and we comforted one another and we cried together,

Earlier this week, Activision Blizzard employees in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a major media labor union, filed an unfair labor practices suit with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal government's labor law agency, accusing the video game giant of worker intimidation and union busting. It's the latest collective action in the wake of a California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) suit against Activision Blizzard filed in July that alleged widespread gender-based discrimination and harassment. In the months since, Activision Blizzard employees have staged a walkout, and workers at other major video game companies like Ubisoft have banded together to demand similar improvements to their own workplaces. Collective action in the American video game industry is on the rise, even if unionization isn't.

In July, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued video-game giant Activision Blizzard, alleging, more or less, that the company has a workplace environment from hell. Regulators said a two-year investigation into the company revealed an alcohol-drenched "frat boy" culture that included inappropriate conduct by executives, men openly joking about rape, and a general "breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women." The company called the lawsuit "truly meritless and irresponsible" (though it seemed to have some trouble figuring out how to respond), and more than 2,000 current and former employees responded by putting their names on an open letter that said, "We no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests." In early August, employees shared their salaries en masse, Bloomberg reported, to pressure the company into confronting pay inequities. One executive, Blizzard head J. Allen Brack, resigned.