Today, the second largest union at Microsoft was formed with more than 500 World of Warcraft developers across multiple departments including WoW’s QA, Art, Sound, Design, Engineering, and Production. The World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild is the largest wall-to-wall union at Microsoft.
According to several developers, things started to take shape following Blizzard’s response to the discrimination lawsuit from the state of California.
Paul Cox, Senior Quest Designer said “A lot of the early responses felt very corporate and didn’t feel like they reflected the values that, as a company, we said we upheld.”
Kathryn Friesen, a Quest Designer, spoke on how the union came out of the desire to uphold one of Blizzard’s company values: every voice matters.
“You can tell just by talking to people how much they care about one another and the work that they do in the game,” Friesen said. “I think that that’s where [the unionization effort] comes from, the desire to stand together to fight for collective bargaining rights at the table.”
Test Analyst and member of the union’s organizing committee Eric Lanham says employees are seeking to address issues such as hours, pay, transparency around promotions, remote work, and layoff protections.
300 workers cast votes in favor of joining the Communications Workers of America according to the ballot count conducted Wednesday by a third-party arbitrator, 18 voted no.
“The decision by workers on World of Warcraft to form a union marks a key inflection point in the broader movement for game worker organizing industry-wide,” Tom Smith, CWA’s senior director of organizing, said in a statement. “What seemed impossible six years ago is now a reality.”
“We continue to support our employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. “We will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement.”