This week staff on Blizzard’s “Story and Franchise Growth” group “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 Growth group is Blizzard’s in-house cinematics, animation, and narrative group, producing the trailers, promotional movies, in-game cutscenes, and different narrative content material for Blizzard franchises — in addition to franchise archival staff and historians. These staff would be the first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to type a union within the North American recreation trade, becoming a member of practically 3,000 staff 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 newest replace in organizing the tech and online game trade, as over 6,000 staff in america and Canada have organized with the Marketing campaign to Arrange Digital Staff (CODE-CWA) since launching over 5 years in the past. Final week, staff 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,” reviews the gaming information website Aftermath, in accordance with the labor neutrality coverage Microsoft agreed to in 2022, resulting in a number of different union recreation studios at Microsoft:
In July 2024, 500 staff on Blizzard-owned World of Warcraft fashioned a union that they known as “the most important wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio,” alongside Blizzard QA staff in Austin. Different studios throughout Microsoft have additionally unionized in recent times, 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 staff 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 now we have joined collectively in forming a union to guard my colleagues from issues like misguided insurance policies and instability on account of layoffs.”
