Almost two months after Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotik announced that the company would finally begin negotiating its first union contract with him. Workers Alliance at Game Raven SoftwareThe Blizzard Albany team is currently working on it Diablo IVIt is said that the publisher again tried to break the association. They accuse Activision Blizzard of law firm Reed Smith of undermining their corporate efforts. Voluntary recognition of the company’s second trade union.

“Instead of following Microsoft’s approach and adhering to a labor neutrality agreement, Activision made a clear and conscious decision to strip us of our basic labor rights, while again wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on a company that preaches unions,” said the Albany Game Workers Alliance. , which regulates things like improving pay, health and work-life balance, it wrote in a press release Wednesday. “Activivision is once again asking for the help of Blizzard Reid Smith,” the team says.Skip the link“Services, a ‘futile attempt’ to ‘delay approval’.” As the workers said, Reed Smith wants the National Labor Relations Board to deny union rights to an individual quality assurance committee.

When asked to respond, The sense of duty Publishers He did not say why the law firm Reed Smith was being rehired or how much he was paying, but he did confirm that he was again pushing for a studio-wide vote on consolidation. “Given the significant impact this change could have on the approximately 150 people at Albany (formerly Vicarious Visions), we believe every Albany employee working at Diablo should have a direct say in this decision; no less than 15% of employees should,” company spokesman Rich George said in a statement. wrote in an emailed statement.

And she continued:

The Albany-based group is an integrated group that focuses on sports franchises and works on related sports features and operations. These employees share great commonalities in their work, and it is essential to maintain coherence during the game’s complex development and production process.

This The same operating manual as published by the company last time When Raven Software first sought integration. First, it integrated the QA team directly into other departments within the wider studio, and then, for this and other reasons, it argued that the entire studio should vote for a syndicate rather than those in QA, who were already heavily supported. In the end, the National Action Council sided with the workers, but it delayed action for several more months.

Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard has teamed up with Reed Smith International At the time he boasted on his website Avoid companies and help unions fight. He even saved a PowerPoint presentation on his website It includes slides on how unions are trying to do this Take advantage of lazy workers Strategies to convince workers that unions are a bad idea. This presentation has since been deleted.

Activision Blizzard’s battle against Merge has been renewed two months after Microsoft is now ready to buy it for $69 billion. It announced that it would be “neutral”. The efforts of the corporation should progress. It could also point to new sources for Activision as part of a campaign to win regulatory approval for the largest tech acquisition in history. Most likely not. The transaction is expected to close before June 2023.