The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has sunk a last-ditch attempt by Activision to delay a unionization vote (open in new tab) by Blizzard Albany's QA staff.Activision has asked the NLRB to review its decision that Blizzard Albany's 18-member QA team to review its decision that they could unionize independently of the studio's other workers, arguing instead that all 107 of the studio's staff should vote. Activision further requested that the vote be postponed while that review was conducted; the NLRB gave short shrift to both requests.

"The employer's request for reconsideration is denied because it does not raise a substantial issue warranting reconsideration," the NLRB wrote in its response (opens in new tab), meaning that Activision's secondary request to postpone the vote was "rejected as moot."

That is not to say that the NLRB summarily dismissed Activision's petition, although in its response the NLRB noted that an all-studio vote would normally be appropriate due to "an unusual degree of functional integration and contact between departments." It acknowledged that the particularity of the situation in which Blizzard Albany's QA team finds itself justifies taking a different course of action.

"Testers are independent departments and under independent supervision, perform distinct functions, utilize distinct skills, and are paid significantly less than excluded employees," says the NLRB. In other words, the QA team's "community of interest" is sufficiently different from the rest of Blizzard Albany's staff to warrant a smaller, more specific unionization process The issue of the QA team's lower pay compared to other Albany staff has been previously addressed by the NLRB addressed (open in new tab), and it is hard not to feel that it is a contradiction created by Activision to push back on itself to some extent.

Even though their request was rejected, Activision did succeed in delaying unionization a bit. The votes were originally scheduled to be counted on November 18, but could not be counted while the NLRB was formulating its decision; in a tweet (opens in new tab) celebrating the NLRB ruling, workers organizing the Albany union (under the Game Workers of America Albany banner) said they are currently awaiting a new election date. They also called Activision's petition "a bitter attempt to silence our union" and said they are "waiting without interruption for the impending vote count"

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In response to PCG, an Activision spokesperson said, "We believe that all teams in Albany should have the right to vote. This is to maintain basic fairness for all members of the team, given the close-knit and collaborative way Blizzard Albany operates, and to ensure that all employees have the right to choose"

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In the past, Activision has stated that it respects the right of its employees to form a union, but has repeatedly emphasized that it believes the Albany vote should be studio-wide, not just for the QA team In mid-October, experts interviewed by The Washington Post described this as a classic tactic (opens in new tab) to dampen voters' enthusiasm for unionizing.

The conflict over Blizzard Albany is not the only unionization issue Activision is currently facing. While this issue has been brewing, the company has also been battling the NLRB over Raven Software's QA team. Raven's QA staff became the first major U.S. developer to unionize (opens in new tab) in May of this year, ultimately forcing Activision to end months of resistance and recognize them in June (opens in new tab). Most recently, the NLRB found that Activision withheld raises from unionized Raven staffers as an "act of retaliation" (opens in new tab), which Activision strongly denies. the exchange between the head of the NLRB and an Activision executive on the matter I have to imagine that things have cooled off a bit.