The bad news for Activision-Blizzard isn’t stopping. We heard about many scandals regarding their CEO last year, including the problems with the work environment. And today, Proletariat, the developer studio worked on WoW: Dragonflight under Activision-Blizzard, joining the unionizing snowball. The employees complain about the bad work conditions and ask the parent company to fix these problems. The company joined Activision-Blizzard this year, and the problems started only after a few months. Considering the studio was founded 10 years ago, it makes us distrust Activision about their human resources management.
Microsoft acquired Activision-Blizzard last year, but the acquisition hasn’t been completed. The analysts expect the acquisition to be completed by June 2023 worldwide. Furthermore, the deal has already been approved in a few countries. This unionizing isn’t a problem that will affect the deal, but it harms the fanbase’s trust.
WoW: Dragonflight Developer Studio Proletariat Is Unionizing
The studio workers announced the details of the flood, with an account they created on Twitter. The flood simply explains why they’re unionizing, and what they ask from the parent company. This is a unique protest because the union isn’t organized by the studio managers. Proletariat Workers Alliance aims to keep the studio’s culture they created in 2012 and don’t want to work in an injured workplace. Here are the tweets the alliance shared:
We are excited to announce that the workers of Proletariat have asked management to voluntarily recognize our union, the Proletariat Workers Alliance. 1/14 pic.twitter.com/JtYTCvJT5X
— Proletariat Workers Alliance (CWA) (@WeArePWA_CWA) December 27, 2022
A few changes they want are optional remote working, no push for overtime hours, a flexible PTO policy, and better health insurance. These already must be provided by a big company like Activision-Blizzard. The companies that aren’t related in crunch-culture are already providing these kinda benefits. Proletariat workers are doing a big job and working on WoW: Dragonflight, which got all the WoW fanbase’s attention. As the consumers of the content, we hope to hear a positive return from the parent company. And the other is, we don’t want to get updates delayed; Activision-Blizzard should solve this.
