Organized labor won one of its biggest wins Tuesday at a US tech company, gaining a foothold among about 300 employees at a Microsoft-owned video game maker.
The Communications Workers of America, who will represent the employees, announced the result and Microsoft issued a statement acknowledging the result.
“We look forward to negotiating in good faith as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement,” the company said. Microsoft has no other union members.
The union movement at video game maker ZeniMax Media, which Microsoft acquired for about $7.5 billion in a deal that closes in 2021, did not involve a conventional union election organized by the National Labor Relations Board.
Instead, the company allowed employees to express their preferences one of two ways: They could sign a union authorization card, which some began doing in November, or they could vote anonymously through an online platform that was open for most of December.
Labor organization and trade union actions
The process was more efficient and less controversial than the run-up to a typical labor council election, which can involve extensive legal wrangling.
Microsoft agreed to remain neutral during the union campaign and avoid the anti-union rallies and messages that many companies participate in. The concessions came as the company attempted to appease antitrust regulators scrutinizing its proposed $70 billion video game acquisition. maker Activision Blizzard.
“This is a powerful victory that allows us to protect ourselves and each other in a way we never could without a union,” Skylar Hinnant, a staff member involved with the organizing campaign, said in a statement.
When workers at a massive Amazon warehouse in Staten Island pressed to organize last year, the company aggressively resisted. The union triumphed in April, but Amazon has challenged the results. Apple has also tried to persuade retail workers not to join a union, although employees at two stores voted to do so.
ZeniMax employees involved in the campaign, which only included quality assurance, or QA employees, said Microsoft’s neutral stance came as a relief. “It was nothing short of an absolute gift,” Autumn Mitchell, a worker active in the union effort, said during an interview last month.
In another sign that unionization in the games industry is gaining momentum, employees at an Activision-owned studio in Boston announced last week that they had filed a petition to hold union elections.
Two other Activision studios have already voted to join a union — one in Wisconsin and the other near Albany, NY. , not just QA staff. A formal union with broader membership appears to be a first for a major US game maker.
The Communications Workers of America represents the employees of the two Activision studios who have already joined a union that would represent the Boston-based employees.
At ZeniMax, which also includes high-profile Bethesda Game Studios, maker of hits like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, workers said they hoped a union would improve their wages and hours. QA testers and other industry workers have long complained about having to endure grueling work shortly before a title is released.
Microsoft has said it is consulting with employees to make sure they are not taking on too much work.
Those who wanted to unionize at ZeniMax also said they hoped to change the company’s approach to promoting employees and assigning them more responsibility, which they felt was sometimes arbitrary, and that they hoped to be able to negotiate a more flexible remote work policy.
In June, Microsoft announced a deal with the communications union in which it pledged to remain neutral if any of Activision’s US employees joined a union after Microsoft acquired the company. The video game maker has about 7,000 U.S. employees, most of whom are eligible to join a union.
Officially, the employment contract only applied to employees who joined Microsoft through the purchase of Activision. But the tech giant indicated it would be open to extending the terms of the employment contract to current employees as well.
The politically powerful communications union had expressed reservations about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, but said the neutrality deal allayed its concerns, and the union president later met with the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to push for support for the deal.
But regulators have not been appeased. The agency filed a lawsuit in December to block the Activision transaction, just as ZeniMax employees decided to join a union.
