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Activision Blizzard Worker Organization
ABK Workers Alliance (ABK standing for "Activision-Blizzard-King") is a group of organized workers from video game company Activision Blizzard. Formed in response to a July 2021 state lawsuit against the company for harassment and discriminatory work practices, the worker advocacy group A Better ABK organized walkouts and demonstrations against the company's policy and practices. The quality assurance workers of subsidiary Raven Software went on strike in December after part of the team was fired. The striking workers announced their union as the Game Workers Alliance in late January 2022 and offered to end the strike pending their union's recognition. Background California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard in July 2021 with claims of having fostered a toxic "frat boy" work culture in which women were routinely subject to harassment and discrimination. The company's dismissive response upset employees, who sought to see the company's wor ...
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Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979, in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari, Inc., Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the experience of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition ...
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Ars Technica
''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. ''Ars Technica'' was privately owned until May 2008, when it was sold to Condé Nast Digital, the online division of Condé Nast Publications. Condé Nast purchased the site, along with two others, for $25 million and added it to the company's ''Wired'' Digital group, which also includes '' Wired'' and, formerly, Reddit. The staff mostly works from home and has offices in Boston, Chicago, London, New York City, and San Francisco. The operations of ''Ars Technica'' are funded primarily by advertising, and it has offered a paid subscription service since 2001. History Ken Fisher, who serves as the website's current editor-in-chief, and Jon Stokes created ''Ars Technica'' in 1998. Its purpose was t ...
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Employer Recognition Of Labor Unions In The United States
The National Labor Relations Board, an agency within the United States government, was created in 1935 as part of the National Labor Relations Act. Among the NLRB's chief responsibilities is the holding of elections to permit employees to vote whether they wish to be represented by a particular labor union. Congress amended the Act in 1947 through the Taft–Hartley Act to give workers the ability to decertify an already recognized or certified union as well. This article describes, in a very summary manner, the procedures that the NLRB uses to hold such elections, as well as the circumstances in which a union may obtain the right to represent a group of employees without an election. Obtaining authorization cards To obtain an NLRB-conducted election, the union must file a petition supported by a showing of interest from at least thirty percent of the employees in the group that the union seeks to represent, typically called the bargaining unit. Unions typically use authorizatio ...
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CODE-CWA
The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and employed at least two full time staff, including GWU co-founder Emma Kinema and veteran SEIU organizer Wes McEnany. In 2022, Jessica Gonzalez joined, a former Activision Blizzard QA tester. CODE-CWA campaigns have been launched at a range of workplaces such as major multinational tech companies, small startups, video game studios, media companies, AAA game publishers, worker co-operatives, and table-top game companies. As of August 2022, CODE-CWA has organized over 3000 union members in various sub-industries of the tech sector across over 25 bargaining units in the last two years of organizing. __TOC__ Campaigns See also * Alphabet Workers Union * Game Workers Unite * Google worker organization * Tech unions in the United St ...
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Communication Workers Of America
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media trade union, labor union in the United States, representing about 700,000 members in both the private and public sectors (also in Canada and Puerto Rico). The union has 27 Local union, locals in Canada via CWA-SCA Canada () representing about 8,000 members. CWA has several affiliated subsidiary labor unions bringing total membership to over 700,000. CWA is headquartered in Washington, DC, and affiliated with the AFL–CIO, the Strategic Organizing Center, the Canadian Labour Congress, and UNI Global Union. History In 1918 telephone operators organized under the Telephone Operators Department of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. While initially successful at organizing, the union was damaged by a 1923 strike and subsequent AT&T Corporation, AT&T lockout. After AT&T installed company-controlled Employees' Committees, the Telephone Operators Department eventually disbanded. The CWA's ...
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Strike Fund
Strike pay is a payment made by a trade union to workers who are on strike to help in meeting their basic needs while on strike, often out of a special reserve known as a ''strike fund''. Union workers reason that the availability of strike pay increases their leverage at the bargaining table and actually decreases the probability of a strike, since the employers are aware that their employees have this financial resource available to them if they choose to strike. When workers strike, they can also subsist using pre-strike income and savings. It has also been used in Australian law to mean payments by employers to compensate lost earnings by employees during industrial action. Strike pay, under the usual meaning above, "is relatively uncommon in both Australia and New Zealand" according to Velden et al. By countries Spain The main unions providing a strike fund in Spain are (USO) and the Basque Basque Workers' Solidarity (ELA-STV). According to ELA, its fund received 13.7 mill ...
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Crunch (video Games)
In the video game industry, crunch (or crunch culture) is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours. It is often used as a way to cut the costs of game development, a labor-intensive endeavour. However, it leads to negative health impacts for game developers and a decrease in the quality of their work, which drives developers out of the industry temporarily or permanently. Critics of crunch note how it has become normalized within the game-development industry, to deleterious effects for all involved. A lack of unionization on the part of game developers has often been suggested as the reason crunch exists. Organizations such as Game Workers Unite aim to fight against crunch by forcing studios to honour game developers' labor rights. Description Crunch time vs. crunch culture "Crunch time" is the point ...
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Call Of Duty
''Call of Duty'' is a first-person shooter military video game series and media franchise published by Activision, starting in 2003. The games were first developed by Infinity Ward, then by Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games. Several spin-off and handheld games were made by other developers. The most recent, '' Call of Duty: Black Ops 6'', was released on October 25, 2024. The series originally focused on a World War II setting, with Infinity Ward developing '' Call of Duty'' (2003) and '' Call of Duty 2'' (2005) and Treyarch developing '' Call of Duty 3'' (2006). Infinity Ward's '' Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare'' (2007) introduced a modern setting and proved to be the breakthrough title for the series, creating the ''Modern Warfare'' sub-series; a ''Modern Warfare'' remastered version released in 2016. Two other entries, '' Modern Warfare 2'' (2009) and '' Modern Warfare 3'' (2011), were made. The sub-series received a reboot with '' Modern Warfare'' in 2019, '' Modern Wa ...
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Axios (website)
''Axios'' (styled ΛXIOS in the logo) is an American news website based in Arlington, Virginia. It was founded in 2016 and launched the following year by former ''Politico'' journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. The site's name is based on the (), meaning "worthy of". ''Axios'' articles are often brief to facilitate quick reading; most are shorter than 300 words and use bullet points. In addition to news articles, ''Axios'' produces daily and weekly industry-specific newsletters (including Allen's ''Axios AM'', a successor to his newsletter '' Politico Playbook'' for ''Politico''), and two daily podcasts. On September 1, 2022, Cox Enterprises completed its acquisition of ''Axios''. History VandeHei said he wanted ''Axios'' to be a "mix between ''The Economist'' and Twitter". The company initially covered a mix of business, politics, technology, health care, and media. VandeHei said ''Axios'' would focus on the "collision between tech and areas such as ...
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Jessica Gonzalez (labor Organizer)
Jessica Gonzalez (born 1992 or 1993) is an American labor organizer working with CODE-CWA, the Communication Workers of America's Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. She is known for her work organizing in the video game industry and founding A Better ABK, the worker advocacy group at Activision Blizzard, and co-founding ABK Workers Alliance, a solidarity union, and Game Workers Alliance, the Raven Software union. Career and activism Gonzalez joined Activision Blizzard (ABK) in 2015 as a quality assurance (QA) tester. She left the company for a few years to work for ''Boundless Entertainment,'' but returned to ABK in 2019 until leaving the company in 2021 due to what she alleged to be a hostile working environment. She worked briefly for a financial tech company following her departure, while working part-time as an organizer with CODE-CWA. She later joined CODE-CWA full-time. Gonzalez also alleged that in QA at ABK, testers were treated as "second-class citizens", which ...
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Gender Pay Gap
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are Employment, employed. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct measurements of the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience. In other words, the adjusted values represent how much women and men make for the same work, while the non-adjusted values represent how much the average man and woman make in total. In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary. The reasons for the gap link to legal, social and economic factors. These include having children (motherhood penalty vs. fatherhood bonus), parental leave, gender discrimination and gender norms. Additionally, the consequences of the g ...
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National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States that enforces United States labor law, U.S. labor law in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the NLRB has the authority to supervise elections for trade union, labor union representation and to investigate and remedy unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of protected concerted activity. The NLRB is governed by a five-person board and a General Counsel, general counsel, all of whom are appointed by the President of the United States, president with the Advice and consent, consent of the United States Senate, Senate. Board members are appointed for five-year terms and the general counsel is appointed for a four-year term. The general counsel acts as a prosecutor and the board acts as a ...
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