Blizzard workers join the trend, begin sharing their salary data with each other
Alphabet workers news
Bloomberg reported on Monday that employees at Blizzard Entertainment, known in particular for World of Warcraft and Diablo, have now started to share salary data with each other. As a reminder, sharing and discussing your compensation with other workers is protected activity under U.S. labor law, and the trend is growing. As a former Google employee, I can confirm that Google employees have been collectively sharing salary data for many years, to the point where the independent volunteer share-your-salary team is now starting to reverse-engineer various bonus and other compensation multipliers that Google would prefer to keep secret from its employees. Sharing salary data pushes back against one form of information power imbalance, which is why so many workers are starting to do it.
I'll put some extracts from the Bloomberg article below.
- Bruce
_____________________
Blizzard Workers Share Salaries in Revolt Over Wage Disparities
Employees at Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard Inc., began circulating a spreadsheet on Friday to anonymously share salaries and recent pay increases, the latest example of rising tension in the video game industry over wage disparities and executive compensation...
In internal messages reviewed by Bloomberg News, Blizzard employees said they were struggling to make ends meet while watching Activision Blizzard revenue grow year after year. Some producers and engineers at Blizzard can make well over $100,000 a year, but others, such as video game testers and customer-service representatives, are often paid minimum wage or close to it.
... in recent years, Activision’s corporate office has pushed the game-development studio to cut costs. Last year, the company eliminated hundreds of jobs and asked some of the remaining staff to take on the responsibilities of those who were let go. That extra work did not come with more pay...
One veteran Blizzard employee told Bloomberg News they received a raise of less than 50 cents an hour. They are making less now than they did almost a decade ago because they are working fewer overtime hours than they did back then. Several former Blizzard employees said they only received significant pay increases after leaving for other companies...
In 2018 messages on internal Blizzard communication channels reviewed by Bloomberg News, employees talked about money-saving measures they’ve taken to remain with the company. One employee wrote that they had to skip meals to pay rent and that they used the company’s free coffee as an appetite suppressant. Another said they would only eat oatmeal and bail on team lunches because they couldn’t afford to buy food at the company cafeteria. A third said they and their partner stopped talking about having kids because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it...