Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft Dev Team Has Unionized
Blizzard developers working on World of Warcraft have voted to unionize, increasing the number of unionized workers at Microsoft’s games division by roughly 500. Their addition to the union brings the total number of unionized game devs at Microsoft to 1,750.
“It’s exciting to potentially raise the standards of the entire industry as siblings in organizing,” World of Warcraft designer (and member of the union’s organization committee) Kathryn Friesen said in a recent statement to Bloomberg.
Although Microsoft has yet to make any official statement regarding the unionization, it hasn’t made moves to block employees from unionizing. In 2022–while in the midst of negotiating the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard–Microsoft finalized an agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) with the goal of making it easier for employees in certain positions to unionize, and later announced it would support the organizing efforts of other American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (ALF-CIO) unions in a similar way. ALF-CIO is the largest federation of unions in the United States.