Activision Blizzard’s Platform and Technology workers unionize with CWA

Nearly 400 workers within Blizzard’s Platform and Technology voted “strongly in favor of union representation with the Communications Workers of America (CWA),” according to the official CWA blog post published on Oct. 15. Their responsibilities extend to localization, quality assurance (QA) testing, and customer support across the rest of Blizzard’s product line. 

Within the published statement, Principal Software Engineer Daniel Weltz highlighted the importance of the people, stating that they are forming a union to hold leadership accountable and to ensure that they “can focus on building amazing experiences for the gaming community.” 

Senior Data Scientist Alex Kohn emphasized the significance of empowering the workers to focus on delivering their best work at Blizzard. In August, Blizzard’s Story and Franchise Development team also joined the union with the CWA; this team is responsible for creating cinematics, animation, and narrative content. 

As of writing, over 6,000 workers in the United States and Canada have organized with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) since its debut over five years ago. The CWA helped the ZeniMax QA developers secure a contract with Microsoft in June. The CWA is one of the largest labor unions in the United States, with over 700,000 workers in total.