Last week, Raven Software's QA staff voted to form North America's very first gaming union. This came after Raven QA staff went on strike for seven weeks following the termination of 12 of their members considered essential and after years of abusive behavior by management. The strike ended with a request for recognition from Activision management in a show of good faith.
That good faith seems to have been ill-placed. Polygon reporter Nicole Carpenter recently obtained an email sent to Raven staff confirming structural changes within the company. Conveniently, the first change outlined in the email will break up Raven's QA team and embed it amongst other departments.
"In November, we began the process to convert our temporary employees to FTE status,” wrote Raven studio head Brian Raffel. “Now, I’m excited to share that our QA colleagues will embed directly within various teams across the studio, including Animation, Art, Design, Audio, Production, and Engineering."
It should be noted that the conversion to full-time process mentioned in Raffel's email resulted in 12 QA staffers losing their jobs and touched off the seven-week strike. The timing of the announcement is also highly suspicious given that Raven's remaining QA staff voted to unionize just days ago. Now they're going to be broken up and tossed around the studio, likely hampering their efforts to organize.
In a statement, Activision Publishing acknowledged that these organizational changes will bring Raven in line with how other Activision studios embed their QA staff and will “enhance the collaborative work our teams do to support our games and our players.” Activision didn’t acknowledge the recent union vote or make any mention of Raven QA’s new union.
Activision's efforts to stop unionization at its studios are no secret. The company hired a notorious union-busting firm soon after the California DFEH broke the story of Activision's toxic work environment. Since then, company executives have intimidated employees against unionization efforts. This seems to be the latest effort to crush unionization at Raven before it can push for structural change.