Activision workers are calling out the studio's treatment of QA departments, as Raven Software enters its second month of strikes. On top of the well-documented accusations of harbouring a toxic work environment - including protecting abusers - the industry giant is also said to keep staff on temporary contracts, before laying them off without warning and leaving the rest of the team overworked.
This comes from employee advocacy group ABK Workers Alliance, and reveals that some of the "temporary" workers have actually been employed for four years, across multiple Call of Duty games. The group claims that Activision is "exploiting" the department through this overuse of temporary contracts, which left 12 workers without jobs just days before Christmas.
"Prior to the layoffs of 12 Raven testers, Raven QA - a department consisting of more than thirty-five people - had only four full-time employees", the ABK Workers Alliance tweet thread opens. "The rest of Raven’s QA testers were considered “'temporary'."
"Rather than give the entire team the full-time positions they long deserved, Activision slashed Raven’s already understaffed QA department by a third. The extra workload this creates will inevitably be passed on to testers at Activision’s QA Minnesota and QA Texas locations, which combined employ over 800 temporary employees and contractors and just 31 regular full-time employees".
Earlier this week, Raven workers shared their demands with Activision. They call on the company to grant them all full-time employment and rehire everyone who was laid off in December.
Activision says that Raven Software management has "engaged in dialogue" with the workers on strike. It says the company plans to make 500 employees full-time, but refused to walk back on the layoffs. Given today's statement from the ABK Workers Alliance, it is safe to assume that these talks have not been productive.
The protest continues, with a strike fund set up to help workers with the financial blow of being out of work.