Activision Blizzard Is Refusing to Voluntarily Recognize Proletariat Union

In late December, workers at Spellbreak developer Proletariat, acquired by Blizzard last summer, announced its intention to unionize asking the company's management to voluntarily recognize its union, the Proletariat Workers Alliance.

And now it has been revealed that the Warcraft maker is refusing to voluntarily acknowledge the employee union.

On Monday, the Proletariat leadership team posted a note to the Proletariat Games blog saying that the company has started the process to have a formal vote conducted with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as it believes that "many of [its] employees prefer to have an anonymous vote."

According to Proletariat, an NLRB election would not only be "the fairest option" but will also allow employees to "get all the information and various points of view."

"This is an important decision, everyone deserves some time to process it and to better understand its potential impacts," the company wrote. "The Proletariat leadership is and has always been pro-worker."

The Communication Workers of America union later addressed the Proletariat leadership team's statement noting that the company's actions "have been right out of the union-busting playbook used by Activision and so many others."

"Our Proletariat leadership and upper management at Activision have refused our requests to talk about neutrality and are forcing us through an NLRB election, even though a supermajority of our bargaining unit have signed union cards, and that is not pro-worker," the CWA wrote. 

The union added that a number of Proletariat workers were disappointed by the company's recent town hall which was "inappropriate due to its anti-union influence" and recalled that the meeting was held on the same day when Microsoft voluntarily recognized a QA union across its ZeniMax studios which it called an example of "a fair and free union representation election, held under a neutrality agreement that included an option for anonymous voting."

Last year, workers from two Activision Blizzard-owned studios, Raven Software and Blizzard Albany, successfully formed unions. However, in both cases the publisher made the groups of workers willing to unionize go through the formal voting process rather than acknowledge the unions.

To stay tuned, follow the Proletariat Workers Alliance here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform, our Reddit page, and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.