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Activision Blizzard employees reject union-busting WilmerHale firm in letter to Bobby Kotick

There have been major changes to Blizzard leadership, but the Activision Blizzard employee coalition known as ABetterABK still has one major grievance.

Ozzie Mejia

August 3, 2021 12:10 PM

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It's been an eventful day at Activision Blizzard with a total change in leadership within the Blizzard ranks. However, not all is well over at the Irvine publisher. There's still the matter of Activision's usage of a third-party law firm called WilmerHale, which has a reputation for union busting. An organized group of Activision Blizzard employees penned a letter to CEO Bobby Kotick on Tuesday affirming that this is unacceptable.

Here's the full letter that the employee coalition sent over to IGN:

To CEO Bobby Kotick and the Activision Blizzard executive leadership team,

We are The ABK Workers Alliance, an organized group of current Activision Blizzard, Inc. employees committed to defending our right to a safe and equitable workplace. That right remains endangered as the stories of abuse and mistreatment continue to grow in scope, and new accounts of harassment perpetrated by current Activision Blizzard employees have continued to emerge since the publication of the DFEH’s lawsuit.

Last week, we took collective action to demand better working conditions for women and other marginalized groups at Activision Blizzard King (ABK) by writing an open letter signed by more than 3,000 current employees. We organized the #ActiBlizzWalkout at Blizzard Entertainment’s Irvine headquarters where more than 500 workers walked out and hundreds more participated virtually around the world.

Our request for action crosses studio lines, including workers from Activision, Beenox, Blizzard Entertainment, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, King, Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, and Vicarious Visions. Our goal is for the executive leadership team to address their response to the California DFEH lawsuit, acknowledge the reality of working conditions across our organization, and commit to meaningful change at Activision Blizzard.

We communicated a list of four demands aimed at protecting our most vulnerable workers. These are: (1) an end to forced arbitration in employment agreements, (2) the adoption of inclusive recruitment and hiring practices, (3) increases in pay transparency through compensation metrics, and (4) an audit of ABK policies and practices to be performed by a neutral third-party. Importantly, we demanded that this third party be selected by an employee-led Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion task force.

In response to our demands, you wrote a letter to employees expressing a commitment to doing a better job of listening. You said you would do everything possible to work with employees in improving our workplace. And yet, the solutions you proposed in that letter did not meaningfully address our requests. You ignored our call for an end to mandatory arbitration. You did not commit to adopting inclusive recruitment and hiring practices. You made no comment on pay transparency.

One of our demands, a third-party audit of ABK practices and policies, was ostensibly addressed by your decision to hire WilmerHale to conduct an internal review. While we commend the idea of hiring a third-party firm to perform an internal review, The ABK Workers Alliance cannot support the choice of WilmerHale as an impartial reviewer.

We reject the selection of WilmerHale for the following reasons:

• WilmerHale’s pre-existing relationships with Activision Blizzard and its executives create an unacceptable conflict of interest.
  • Activision Blizzard has already been a client of WilmerHale, who you used to dispute the Diverse Candidate Search Policy proposed by the AFL-CIO Reserve Fund and UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust [1] earlier in 2021.
  • Frances Townsend is known to have relationships with multiple partners at WilmerHale, including former FBI Director Robert Mueller [2].
• WilmerHale has a history of discouraging workers’ rights and collective action. ○ WilmerHale states on their public website that their services include “advising on union awareness and avoidance” [3].
  • WilmerHale used anti-collective action tactics in their work with Amazon & Uber [4]. ○ In media portrayals, WilmerHale is regularly referred to as a “Union Busting Firm” [5, 6, 7]. We are already seeing the effects of this ideology in actions that leadership has taken to restrict our freedom of association since last week, including reducing the size of listening sessions and limiting access to those sessions.
• The WilmerHale partner leading this investigation, Stephanie Avakian, specializes in protecting the wealthy and powerful.
  • WilmerHale outlined Avakian’s work as: “...counseling and defending financial institutions, public and private companies, hedge funds, accounting firms, investment advisors, boards, corporate executives, and individuals facing regulatory and criminal investigations and litigation with the government [8].”
  • In Stephanie’s speech highlighting her successes with the SEC, all of her significant examples included achievements in favor of investors, retail clients, and customers, but does not once mention employees or laborers [9]. We need legal representation that centers on the concerns of our current employees, rather than investors.

We call on you and your executive leadership team to do better, and to fully address our list of demands. We will not abandon our cause. Our ranks continue to grow across multiple Activision Blizzard studios. While there are structural problems that only you can address, we are already taking steps to improve our workplace through a number of employee-driven initiatives:

• Worker-to-Worker Mentorship: We are building a mentorship program where workers can seek career advice, support, and sponsorship from a network of colleagues in a safe external channel outside company communication networks.
• Open Listening Sessions: We will host listening sessions that will be recorded and disseminated across the organization to facilitate ongoing conversation, education, and emotional support for employees.
• Community Meetings: We will facilitate monthly employee meetings, in a secure external channel, to discuss our concerns, desires, and progress toward achieving our goals. All current ABK employees are welcome to participate in these conversations.

As these actions show, we love our studios and care deeply for our colleagues. We share your expressed unwavering commitment to improving our company together.

We are doing what we can, and we call on you to do what we cannot.

Sincerely,
The ABK Workers Alliance

The letter comes in the wake of Blizzard shaking up its leadership. J. Allen Brack resigned his position on Tuesday morning and will be replaced by former Vicarious Visions studio head Jen Oneal and former Xbox mainstay Mike Ybarra. The full details of the change in leadership are posted over on the Blizzard website.

The Activision Blizzard coalition can be followed on Twitter through the @ABetterABK account. There is no word from Kotick at this time, but we'll be sure to update this story if that changes. In fact, this story is far from over, so keep it on Shacknews. We'll return with the latest news and updates.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?