{"id":11729,"date":"2021-12-07T01:29:22","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T01:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lavozlit.com\/?p=11729"},"modified":"2021-12-07T01:29:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-07T01:29:22","slug":"sexual-harassment-sparks-class-struggle-at-activision-blizzard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2021\/12\/07\/sexual-harassment-sparks-class-struggle-at-activision-blizzard\/","title":{"rendered":"Sexual harassment sparks class struggle at Activision Blizzard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Republished from Socialist Resurgence’s website<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

By SAM P.
\nSince at least July 2021,\u00a0a serious fightback against sexual abuse of workers at Activision Blizzard (ABK), one of the largest video-game publishers in the world, has been ongoing.
\nThe first public signs that this campaign existed came out when a series of lawsuits were filed by former employees and by federal regulators. These lawsuits revealed a horrific culture of workplace abuse, including one incident in which a victim of this abuse committed suicide after sexually explicit photos of her were circulated by her abuser. The severity of the workplace culture, and in particular the story about the woman who committed suicide, propelled the story into the press, and even mainstream news has been covering the story.
\nThe company\u2019s response to the situation was two-faced and evasive. In public statements and press conferences, top executives expressed horror and made big promises about how they intended to fix this culture. However, internally, executives were circulating memos that disputed the authenticity of the claims in the lawsuit and asserted that the company essentially did not need to change. These statements were leaked to the press, sparking even more public outcry and coverage.
\nAfterwards, information came out that the most inflammatory of these memos, supposedly written by one of the few women in an executive position at the company, had in fact been ghost written by a man and that she had simply signed her name to it. To add insult to injury, the company hired a union-busting law firm called WilmerHale for the supposed job of helping to institute the broad changes to their practice, which they had declared unnecessary in internal memos.<\/p>\n

Fight against sexual harassment sparks labor struggle<\/strong><\/p>\n

The PR disaster that this marks for the company facilitated worker organizing. Shortly after the leaks, a public letter signed by roughly a thousand workers at the company was published. In it they declared the company\u2019s response \u201cabhorrent and insulting,\u201d and stated:
\n\u201cOur company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action\u2014and the troubling official responses that followed\u2014we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests. \u2026 To claim this is a \u2018truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,\u2019 while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable. \u2026 We stand with all our friends, teammates, and colleagues, as well as the members of our dedicated community, who have experienced mistreatment or harassment of any kind. We will not be silenced, we will not stand aside, and we will not give up until the company we love is a workplace we can all feel proud to be a part of again. We will be the change.\u201d
\nAfter the publication of this open letter, an organization called A Better ABK\/ABK Workers Alliance called the first walkout of workers at the company and held a July 28 demonstration outside of their offices. The PR disaster was such that management felt compelled to allow the walkout and demonstration, which was organized openly. Hundreds of workers directly walked out, and a majority of workers who work from home signed off. This walkout served as an opportunity to make public the demands for dealing with employer misconduct which were:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current and future. Arbitration clauses protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution.<\/li>\n
  2. The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization. Current practices have led to women, in particular women of color and transgender women, non-binary people, and other marginalized groups that are vulnerable to gender discrimination not being hired fairly for new roles when compared to men.<\/li>\n
  3. Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company. Current practices have led to aforementioned groups not being paid or promoted fairly.<\/li>\n
  4. Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK\u2019s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff. It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Of these demands, workers have already won an end to forced arbitration, which was removed from all contracts on Oct. 28.<\/p>\n

    As organizing spreads, company attacks workers<\/strong><\/p>\n

    After the initial walkout announcing the existence of the ABK organizers, organizing around these issues deepened. The group has spoken publicly on every aspect of the company\u2019s attempts at shallow counter-reform, and publicizing every genuine win they accomplish. The organization has received an echo at other companies infamous for abusive workplace culture as well, with workers at Ubisoft forming a sister organization to the ABK Workers Alliance.
    \nThe union-busting Wilmer Hale\u2019s efforts at smashing this campaign have largely floundered, in part due to its very public nature. A leader at ABKWA told the industry publication\u00a0ESports.GG<\/em>\u00a0in an\u00a0    interview<\/a>:
    \n\u201cBobby [Kotick, the Blizzard CEO] knew that there were spaces forming up. \u2026 But he also has very few resources at his disposal at the moment. He\u2019s been relying heavily on WilmerHale to keep us clamped down. And WilmerHale legit sucks at it. \u2026 A Better ABK started discussing a lot of organizing stuff, even going so far as to openly discuss unionization on public channels. \u2026 And it was weird, because no one was stopping it. Well it turns out, they weren\u2019t even aware of it. There was so much communication, it was impossible to monitor them all.\u201d
    \nActivision CEO Bobby Kottick has been trying to present himself as a ruling moderate working to fix the problems at the company. This is a common trick of the bosses during union campaigns. Setting up one side of management as \u201cpro-worker\u201d and \u201ctrying to change the company\u201d is a version of the classic \u201cgood cop\/bad cop\u201d strategy.<\/p>\n

    Struggle reemerges<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The relative lull in the conflict was broken last week by a major investigative story published in\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>. The Nov. 16 expos\u00e9 revealed that Kottick had lied in virtually every public statement he made about the situation at the company. Not only did he know about the general workplace culture at the company, but there is documented proof that he knew about many of the specific incidents referenced in the lawsuits and did not disclose them to the board of directors. The investigation also discovered several direct accusations of harassment and misconduct against Bobby Kottick himself, which he has worked to hide.
    \nOne particularly gruesome incident is described in the\u00a0WSJ<\/em>\u00a0article: \u201cIn 2006, one of [Kottick\u2019s] assistants complained that he had harassed her, including by threatening in a voice mail to have her killed, according to people familiar with the matter.\u201d
    \nWithin minutes of the story being published, a new walkout was initiated that took on the character of a one-day wildcat strike. Initially, only a couple of dozen people stopped work, but it quickly expanded to hundreds of workers walking off the job at the company\u2019s campus in Irvine, Calif., and at its offices in Minnesota, and calling for the CEO\u2019s resignation. This walkout represented a major escalation of the campaign\u2014both in the militancy of its tactics, and in the fact that the leaders of ABK workers alliance now acknowledged that union organizing is something they have been discussing throughout their existence.
    \nAfter the second walkout, the companies\u2019 board of directors declared their support for Bobby Koticks, citing a zero tolerance on harassment they claim he recently implemented. This claimed zero-tolerance policy has become a widely circulated joke among people sympathetic to the workers at ABK, given how by any reasonable standard such a policy would apply to Kottick himself.
    \nThe workers\u2019 response to the board was to escalate their calls to include the resignation of board members who stand by Kottick, charging that they are complicit with the company\u2019s culture of abuse.<\/p>\n

    Victory can open floodgates<\/strong><\/p>\n

    It is essential to understand this campaign in the context of the technology sector, and specifically, gaming. The ABK actions could be a landmark step in the process of organizing workers in the tech industry. The structure of the video-game industry is such that major publishers own large numbers of development studios. While they directly employ relatively few people, they often indirectly employ thousands to tens of thousands of workers. The publishers can shut down on a whim the studios they own. In effect, the publishers act as gatekeepers against organizing by holding the threat of lockouts against workers who unionize at the developer level.
    \nA victory for organizers at a major publisher like Activision Blizzard has the potential to seriously change the equation for workers across the industry and provide a model for future organizing. Even a defeat, at this point, would still be the kind of defeat that can provide an example to other workers about the path of activism they need to follow.
    \nPhoto: Workers walk out at Activision Blizzard\u2019s campus in Irvine, Calif., on July 28. (Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times \/ REX \/ Shutterstock)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Since at least July 2021,\u00a0a serious fightback against sexual abuse of workers at Activision Blizzard (ABK), one of the largest video-game publishers in the world, has been ongoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882120,"featured_media":11730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27799],"tags":[30635,30636,11898,27734,29960,29829,30637,30638,27733],"class_list":["post-11729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-activision","tag-blizzard","tag-labor","tag-lgbtqi","tag-oppression","tag-sexism","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-video-games","tag-women"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":true},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdQxqk-33b","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}