Over 300 video game workers in Eden Prairie have joined together with colleagues in Texas and California to form the industry’s largest union, looking to protect their work-life balance in a trade notorious for its “crunch culture.”

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced March 8 that about 600 workers at Activision Central Quality Assurance, a division of the Activision Blizzard gaming company, had won voluntary union recognition from Microsoft, the firm’s parent company.

With 334 workers, the Eden Prairie site is Activision Central Quality Assurance’s largest location, and employees there had been trying to organize with CWA for about four years.

Two recent developments – a return-to-office order last November and a round of layoffs in January – kicked the union drive into high gear, organizing committee member Allen Junge said.

“The way management approached layoffs was terrifying,” Junge, a Quality Assurance (QA) functional tester, said. “We’d gotten an email to tell us that layoffs were happening, but nobody knew how many people or who would be laid off. And in the Zoom call, it seemed like even the director of QA didn’t know whether or not we were going to be laid off until we were on the call.

“It was an awful experience, and that got a lot of people motivated.”

Within weeks of the Jan. 26 layoffs, Activision Quality Assurance United (AQAU) had enough support to request recognition from Microsoft under the terms of its labor neutrality pact with the CWA, reached after the tech giant acquired Activision Blizzard in 2022.

Over 1,000 Microsoft video game workers now have CWA representation. They include quality assurance workers with ZeniMax studios, who unionized last year and have since reached groundbreaking agreements on subcontracting and use of artificial intelligence.

“Microsoft continues to keep its commitment to let workers decide for themselves whether they want a union,” CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement. “Time and again, other big companies in the industry have made the decision to undermine and attack their own employees when they join together to form a union. Microsoft’s choice will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry.”

In addition to job security and layoff procedures, AQAU members said they hope to bargain a first contract that raises pay, creates more opportunities for advancement and puts remote work back on the table.

Junge, who lives in Minneapolis and began working for Activision Blizzard after the COVID outbreak in 2020, said getting called into the Eden Prairie office in November amounted to a pay cut for him and many other workers, given the added transportation costs and travel time. The policy is particularly burdensome for workers with disabilities, he added.

“Like a lot of tech companies, they put a lot of talk into diversity-equity-and-inclusion efforts and supporting people with differing abilities and disabilities,” Junge said. “But they’ve taken away the thing that makes our job more accessible to those people.”

QA workers run fully built video games through a series of tests before they hit the market to find bugs or crashes. Companies often pitch the work “as a way to get your foot in the door in the video game industry,” Eden Prairie QA tester Kara Fannon said.

In reality, Junge said, the work is almost always confined to projects that don’t come with opportunities to learn new skills. “We’re isolated,” he said. “Everything we do has to be QA, and there’s not a lot of options elsewhere.”

“At best, we get the internal job posting before the public does,” Fannon added. “We’re ready to grow our careers here and believe that having a strong union contract will set workers and the company up for success.”

As for the “crunch culture” that has become synonymous with video game work, Junge said that’s already starting to change, as workers’ organizing efforts in recent years have brought the industry under greater scrutiny – and raised workers’ own expectations.

“There were some awful experiences that people had, like working 16-hour shifts into the night and having to come in again at the start of their regular shift,” Junge said. “A lot of people kind of saw through it, that it is actually pretty terrible.”

Having organized the industry’s largest union “feels pretty historic,” he added.

“I think we’ll be a good voice for change in not just the gaming industry, but in the tech industry as a whole.”

Members of AQAU-CWA who work in Eden Prairie will join Minneapolis-based CWA Local 7250.

– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor