(Bloomberg) -- World of Warcraft workers have voted to unionize the popular video-game franchise, expanding organized labor’s new foothold at Microsoft Corp. by around 500 employees.
An arbitrator overseeing an election at the company determined that a majority of the Warcraft team’s employees have supported the Communications Workers of America, the union said.
“We continue to support our employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace, and we will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement,” a spokesperson for Microsoft said in an emailed statement.
Their organizing effort, which brings the number of unionized US gaming employees at Microsoft to around 1,750, was buoyed by the company’s unusually union-friendly stance. The new bargaining unit, which includes artists, designers, engineers, producers and quality assurance testers, could help spur more organizing at the company.
“It’s exciting to potentially raise the standards of the entire industry as siblings in organizing,” said Kathryn Friesen, a Warcraft designer and member of the union’s organizing committee.
Rather than campaigning against unionization on its gaming teams, Microsoft continued its recent practice of staying neutral and agreeing to voluntarily recognize and negotiate with the group if it secured majority support, according to the CWA.
The CWA’s win at Warcraft follows a similar victory last week among approximately 240 employees at Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios, which makes games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.
The Warcraft workers are part of Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft acquired last fall.
Leaders of the organizing drive said they hope to secure a say on issues like pay, remote work and workplace diversity and equity. Activision was roiled by controversy prior to being purchased, with the state of California and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filing lawsuits accusing the company of violating civil rights laws.
Hundreds of Activision employees staged a walkout in 2021 after California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a complaint alleging a “frat boy culture” and harassment at the company.
Activision ultimately reached eight-figure settlements with California, the EEOC and the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which had accused the company of failing to maintain sufficient safeguards to address workplace misconduct.
In the California settlement, the parties agreed that “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard.”
In 2022, while seeking government approval to purchase Activision, Microsoft announced a new set of principles, committing to “collaborative approaches that will make it simpler” for workers to choose whether to unionize. The company inked a deal with the CWA on more specific terms to ease unionization of certain jobs, and last year announced it would take a similar approach to organizing efforts by other AFL-CIO unions.
The company also said it would partner with the AFL-CIO to understand how artificial intelligence would affect workers.
Workers say unionization was a longtime topic on the Warcraft team, but organizing efforts gained steam after other employees at Activision and the Microsoft game publisher ZeniMax unionized with the CWA over the past couple years.
World of Warcraft is a two-decade old, online megahit in which players can create characters, complete quests and combat rivals while exploring fantasy realms.
Microsoft is one of many prominent workplaces where unions have scored landmark US organizing victories since the start of the pandemic, including two Apple Inc. stores, an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse, a Volkswagen AG plant and hundreds of Starbucks Corp. cafes.
(Updates with Microsoft comment in third paragraph.)
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