Workers within Blizzard's Story and Franchise Development (SFD) team have unionized to become the latest cohort of Microsoft employees to organize following the company's merger with Activision Blizzard.
SFD is Blizzard's in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative team. It produces trailers, promotional videos, in-game cutscenes, and other narrative content and has now become the first studio of its kind to form a union in the North American game industry.
Parent company Microsoft has recognized the union, which coalesced after the team voted in favor of union representation with Communications Workers of America (CWA) either by signing a union authorization card or advocating for union representation via an online portal. Those SFD employees who pushed for union representation will become members of CWA Local 9510 in Orange County, Calif.
"After more than a decade working at Blizzard, I’ve seen all the highs and lows. For years, Blizzard has been a place where people could build their careers and stay for decades, but that stability’s been fading," said Bucky Fisk, a principal editor and member of the SFD organizing committee.
"With a union, we’re able to preserve what makes this place special, secure real transparency in how decisions are made, and make sure policies are applied fairly to everyone."
Sammi Kay, who also sits on the organizing committee, said the union hopes to "build a future better than we found it."
Almost 3,000 workers have formed CWA unions at Microsoft, which agreed to let workers organize unimpeded in 2022 when it entered into a labor neutrality agreement with CWA.
Earlier this year, union members within the Xbox maker's Raven Software and ZeniMax Media subsidiaries secured historic contracts after years of bargaining. Prior to that, a supermajority of user research workers at Activision voted to unionize to "show what's possible when workers can freely build solidarity in the workplace."
The collective push for unionization at Microsoft comes during a turbulent period for workers at the company, with the U.S. tech giant having just laid off 9,000 workers—including many within its video game business.
Those redundancies marked the company's fourth major round of job cuts in around 18 months.
