Blizzard Company-Wide Meeting Reportedly Made Employees Feel "Extremely Unimportant And Unsupported”

People are people.
Union or not, you will have A holes that do shoddy work, no work, lie, cheat, steal at all levels. Just look at any government, Corporation, anything.
How many here Union or not out work their peers on a regular basis?
See?
 
Rank stacking and emotional tampons being issued in the deluge

“The controversial town hall meeting comes after Blizzard settled with both the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to the tune of millions of dollars, and as multiple groups within Blizzard have unionized.”

Source: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/b...ely-unimportant-and-unsupported/1100-6511643/
Are these people new to working at a large corporation or something? It's the norm to feel undervalued and underappreciated.
 
Unions only cause problems for shareholders. If that pushes the company to cut costs by making worse products then that isn't the unions. That would be because the company is publicly traded. You can't blame a poorly made product against unions when the real culprit is the people on top who thought it was a good idea to outsource to the part of China that barely knew how to make stick house.

Yea, when Activision is worried about their share price. Remember when they fired 800 people to boost their share price? Then soon after they posted the same jobs again because apparently they need people to run their company. It's not unions, but because they're a publicly traded company.
AMEN.

Being publicly traded has massive downsides - that's part of what's fueling the current tech layoffs. The first company that does them gets a stock boost - but more importantly, their stock improves compared to the others directly in their industry. That means that ALL the other companies in said industry must do the same - otherwise it appears that their stock is underperforming the top watermark, which results in the CEO getting slapped. CEOs don't like getting slapped. Thus, mass layoffs.
 
Are these people new to working at a large corporation or something? It's the norm to feel undervalued and underappreciated.
I will say that stack ranking is bullshit MBA garbage - it's absolutely possible to have elite teams (or ones where everyone sucks), and it simply doesn't work at that granularity. It only works on a corporate-wide type of scale (or division).
 
Okay. I guess you prefer the current way things are done: which is to have toxic environments, firing for any reason up to and including managements fault (complete and total job insecurity), zero workers rights, not paying fair wages that at least meet national averages for given jobs, zero PTO, zero sick days, lack of any and all insurance (ironic given your profession), pay raises and bonuses for management but not even cost of living adjustments yearly for anyone else, and the expectation that your job owns you.
I sincerely hope you're working in management as that's the only way you come out ahead on this deal. Otherwise you're advocating against yourself and basically anyone else that works for a living in the US. The reason why Blizzard is even unionized in the first place is because everything I just stated was Blizzard's playbook.
Putting a lot of words in his mouth he didn't say.

So not only are you ignorant in my opinion about unions, but also about me. If you want to differ on opinions, that's fine, but keep your assumptions about me out of your mouth
Oh, the irony.
 
What about how unions almost destroyed the US auto industry?
Are we going to forget about pre-union conditions? This is the big thing people tend to forget, unions didn't come about from a vacuum, they come about because workers are being treated like shit in some way whether it's a toxic work place, sexual harassment, forced overtime, poor working conditions, whatever, and not specifically the US auto industry either, then out of the "fire" of all of that it's still the same fucking company running everything they just now are forced to make certain concessions but it's always the unions fault when bad shit happens.

I'm not saying that unions don't do bad things either, they absolutely do, people like to shit on unions for numerous reasons the main one outside of political ideology is because they feel they were in some way slighted by a union, maybe the guy with more seniority but is a "worse worker" kept a job over a younger person or maybe you're the owner of the company and pissed that you have to pay medical for all your workers that are cutting into your profits, but just remember the reason for all of them is because those companies/entities tried to fuck people over with the mantra of profits over people.
 
Actually I worked in Teamsters Local 63 as part of M-Sort operation in Ontario, California. And for reference, Ontario is the third largest hub in the US, and the largest east of the Mississippi. If it was in a plane from central or eastern US, it goes through Ontario. As does virtually all west coast ground operations.
I then moved into operations management where I worked for Sunrise Sort, which was responsible for all the most expensive packages that UPS deals with: Next Day Early AM. That meant I basically worked every Holiday for every year that I was at UPS.

And I can tell you unequivocally that UPS is better as a result of unions. Without union protection UPS would do what Amazon is doing now: abusing employees, utilize college aged individuals as a disposable workforce, give zero full time options, and give zero retirement options as well as no medical insurance or PTO. People can actually work at UPS for 25 years and retire as a result of the Union. That will never happen at Amazon.

So not only are you ignorant in my opinion about unions, but also about me. If you want to differ on opinions, that's fine, but keep your assumptions about me out of your mouth.


All studies by the fact that they're done in the first place are flawed. By simply observing, results are changed. The other part of this equation especially related to things like work is to have internal bias' checked. Because often times the results become what the people paying for the research wanted, that is to say: confirmation bias.
To look at other fields of study, like health, cigarette companies and sugar companies were able to "spin their data" for 50+ years virtually unopposed. The size of these companies is virtually meaningless. In fact the bigger companies likely have more of an agenda they want to "prove" than a smaller one.

This is also to say nothing about trying to keep your employees at all. Productivity reaches zero when you've lost that employee: and that's a very real situation that they're entering into now. Onboarding new employees and getting them up to speed costs tens of thousands of dollars. More if you count their lack of productivity as a major factor due to not really knowing what their job is for usually 6+ months. Keeping your employees as well as keeping them happy is generally better for productivity.


You're missing my entire point. Nostalgia is directly responsible for the rehashing and reiteration you bring up later in this post. It's trying to sell games based on the idea of "good by association" or otherwise selling through name/brand recognition. Instead of creating a game worth playing.

You're the guy that goes on and on about backwards compatibility. You can continue to play all the 'original' RE games for the next 100 years. The same with the original Dead Space games.
Big hits also don't mean much to me. CoD, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, and Battlefield every other year are also "big hits".

Right, and the something wrong is that most of the industry is focused on how to make "guaranteed money" as best as they understand it. And guaranteed money is all based around IP and nostalgia. Rehash the same thing, hopefully make it 5% better while not accidentally destroying its soul and the core game-play loop. Too bad those last things happen eventually 100% of the time for every organization that doesn't put creative first. Nintendo is basically the only exception to this at this point. Blizzard was, up until they merged with Activision. Now they're producing trash like the rest of them.

This is in stark contrast to making new and inventive game play loops, and novel stories - precisely like Minecraft and Elden Ring. Or Cyberpunk 2077. We have a ton of new titles in the game section of this forum worth looking forward to that are not IP/nostalgia driven.
Lol, you claim I am ignorant of unions I guess that means you are too. I mean I was in one of the worst unions ever like you and that was teamsters local 247. You sound like you were either a steward or a wannabe steward which makes sense with the bs you are peddling.
 
Are we going to forget about pre-union conditions? This is the big thing people tend to forget, unions didn't come about from a vacuum, they come about because workers are being treated like shit in some way whether it's a toxic work place, sexual harassment, forced overtime, poor working conditions, whatever, and not specifically the US auto industry either, then out of the "fire" of all of that it's still the same fucking company running everything they just now are forced to make certain concessions but it's always the unions fault when bad shit happens.

I'm not saying that unions don't do bad things either, they absolutely do, people like to shit on unions for numerous reasons the main one outside of political ideology is because they feel they were in some way slighted by a union, maybe the guy with more seniority but is a "worse worker" kept a job over a younger person or maybe you're the owner of the company and pissed that you have to pay medical for all your workers that are cutting into your profits, but just remember the reason for all of them is because those companies/entities tried to fuck people over with the mantra of profits over people.
Are you going to forget the laws we have now that the people didn't have back then? Unions are no longer even close to being useful like they were when started.
 
I work in healthcare and no, they aren't positive in any shape or form. They increase costs, destroy initiative and protect shitty employees.
I’m not sure where you live but I assure you that the union isn’t the problem, it’s the bean counters, finding the absolute skeleton staffing possible burning out employees who they treat as disposable in a time when medical staffing is at an all time low.
You seem to be under the impression that union members can’t be fired for being terrible, I assure you they can, there is just a process it makes it more difficult sure but it is doable.
 
Putting a lot of words in his mouth he didn't say.
It's called: attacking his position. Directly in that post I stated why: because up to this point the alternatives have been management continues to screw everyone at Blizzard who ain't them or Blizzard employees unionizes so that stops happening.

I'm not sure how you would miss that those things are correlated. You could maybe make the argument that I'm "Strawmanning" except in this case that long laundry list of things was what Blizzard management was doing and/or other non-union shops were/are doing.

wizzi has made zero statements about how all of those problems would be remedied without a union, because they can't. Or alternatively if your argument is that I'm making a false dichotomy demonstrate that. But certainly up to this point there have been zero logical arguments about his position, just the repeated statement that: "all unions are bad". And at the very least that position is demonstrably false.
Oh, the irony.
I have said zero about him, only his position. Do you not know the difference between ad hominem vs attacking the argument?

Lol, you claim I am ignorant of unions I guess that means you are too.
Reading comprehension. I stated clearly that "you're ignorant about my position". And not: "you're ignorant about unions". Because the only things you've said (and said here even again) are ad hominem attacks and not even ones with basis. Which has been the ear-marker of all our discussions thus far.
I mean I was in one of the worst unions ever like you and that was teamsters local 247. You sound like you were either a steward or a wannabe steward which makes sense with the bs you are peddling.
This is again ad hominem. I think you have zero actually interesting things to say about this subject. If you do, you've very selectively chosen to not.

If the structure of power has to be either management or the people (and I would basically say it does), I'd take the people 100% of the time every time. The social ills that come out of "terrible workers" is far less damaging than all of the social ills that come out of management treating people like garbage. You've said zero to argue your case: just blanket statements that "all unions are bad". I guess we can conclude our discourse here. Especially because all of your statements continue to be ones about me (that you're completely ignornant about) and not about the subject at hand.
 
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It's called: attacking his position. Directly in that post I stated why: because up to this point the alternatives have been management continues to screw everyone at Blizzard who ain't them or Blizzard employees unionizes so that stops happening.

I'm not sure how you would miss that those things are correlated. You could maybe make state that I'm "Strawmanning" except in this case that long laundry list of things was what Blizzard management was doing and/or other non-union shops were/are doing.

I have said zero about him, only his position. Do you not know the difference between ad hominem vs attacking the argument?


Reading comprehension. I stated clearly that "you're ignorant about my position". And not: "you're ignorant about unions". Because the only things you've said (and said here even again) are ad hominem attacks and not even ones with basis. Which has been the ear-marker of all our discussions thus far.

This is again ad hominem. I think you have zero actually interesting things to say about this subject. If you do, you've very selectively chosen to not.

If the structure of power has to be either management or the people (and I would basically say it does), I'd take the people 100% of the time every time. The social ills that come out of "terrible workers" is far less damaging than all of the social ills that come out of management treating people like garbage. You've said zero to argue your case: just blanket statements that "all unions are bad". I guess we can conclude our discourse here. Especially because all of your statements continue to be ones about me and not about the subject at hand.
There's more than one way for the structure of power to be with the people - my side of the tech industry is not unionized, and we very much do not want one - and we hold the power, as our skill sets are both limited, unique, and high-paid. If we don't like the working conditions or management, we move jobs (generally fast too), and can negotiate salary/benefits on our own. Are there positions in our industry that could be / maybe should be unionized? Absolutely - but having a union over the last decade would have probably cut my total earnings in half.

It all depends on the type of job and skill sets required, imho - and the market you are in.
 
There's more than one way for the structure of power to be with the people - my side of the tech industry is not unionized, and we very much do not want one - and we hold the power, as our skill sets are both limited, unique, and high-paid. If we don't like the working conditions or management, we move jobs (generally fast too), and can negotiate salary/benefits on our own. Are there positions in our industry that could be / maybe should be unionized? Absolutely - but having a union over the last decade would have probably cut my total earnings in half.

It all depends on the type of job and skill sets required, imho - and the market you are in.
If you're making above 6 figures you don't really care. Your job is in demand enough that you can easily find work somewhere else that will pay you similarly. That gives you power. The benefit to an employee in the case of a tech business with many 100k+ salaried employees would be for things like equity of pay. Companies are often full of deception about what people are getting paid and will gladly short people that "don't know what they're worth". Said another way, unions advocate for people when they don't know how to advocate for themselves as well as evening the playing field regarding things like pay.

If you're a person that has high EQ and/or ruthless, working a difficult job with high specialization you more or less can write your ticket. Most people do not work jobs like that or are not that aggressive trying to climb the ladder or both. Which are things management directly (or indirectly) exploits.

That is certainly not a descriptor of employees at Blizzard most of whom were struggling for median salary or in the case of QA, not even making enough to survive in the OC in California (hence unionization). And definitely not a descriptor of 100% of all blue collar jobs. In both cases the protections that are there are to ensure that employees aren't getting abused in any of the myriad of ways that they can.
 
Being publicly traded has massive downsides - that's part of what's fueling the current tech layoffs.
Maybe but some of the biggest tech layoffs happened in private company like Twitter or Stripe enought that we should look at the private one vs public one before being sure, there was quite the long continuous growth in those company in recent years.

People that say that GM would not have had issues with providing really good health insurance to almost 0.5% of the American population living through an explosion of healthcare cost and pension plan designed during a different life expectancy era in the last 15 years would they have made better cars or not been a publicly traded company, it is something you really sitted down and calculated to speak with some authority and insurance or it is just some Internet hyperbole and just say it like that, pure speculation ?
 
If you're making above 6 figures you don't really care. Your job is in demand enough that you can easily find work somewhere else that will pay you similarly. That gives you power. The benefit to an employee in the case of a tech business with many 100k+ salaried employees would be for things like equity of pay. Companies are often full of deception about what people are getting paid and will gladly short people that "don't know what they're worth". Said another way, unions advocate for people when they don't know how to advocate for themselves as well as evening the playing field regarding things like pay.

If you're a person that has high EQ and/or ruthless, working a difficult job with high specialization you more or less can write your ticket. Most people do not work jobs like that or are not that aggressive trying to climb the ladder or both. Which are things management directly (or indirectly) exploits.

That is certainly not a descriptor of employees at Blizzard most of whom were struggling for median salary or in the case of QA, not even making enough to survive in the OC in California (hence unionization). And definitely not a descriptor of 100% of all blue collar jobs. In both cases the protections that are there are to ensure that employees aren't getting abused in any of the myriad of ways that they can.
Oh absolutely, and somehow (I honestly haven't figured out how), even though I'd expect the designers/devs/etc to be more able to write their own ticket and the like, they can't - I haven't figured out if it's because all these companies are collaborating together or not, but it's definitely true.
 
Maybe but some of the biggest tech layoffs happened in private company like Twitter or Stripe enought that we should look at the private one vs public one before being sure, there was quite the long continuous growth in those company in recent years.
True - in that case it's the board of directors expecting more of a reutrn.
People that say that GM would not have had issues with providing really good health insurance to almost 0.5% of the American population living through an explosion of healthcare cost and pension plan designed during a different life expectancy era in the last 15 years would they have made better cars or not been a publicly traded company, it is something you really sitted down and calculated to speak with some authority and insurance or it is just some Internet hyperbole and just say it like that, pure speculation ?
I don't quite follow?
 
I don't quite follow?
There a parallel conversation about generals motors issues of the past that seem to try to brush off the giant debt GM had of employees (and ex-employees and ex-employees widows) has an big issue, that would the company had been private or made bigger car they would have been ok (while competing against company without any retired employees) or that unions didn't made fixing that issues without the state involvement virtually impossible.

I wonder how much one can talk with authority on that accounting statement.

True - in that case it's the board of directors expecting more of a reutrn.
If you are financed via banks-private equity, etc... instead of the stock market, those loans can come with condition, some that can kick automatically has well, boards of director can be handcuffed
 
I will say that stack ranking is bullshit MBA garbage - it's absolutely possible to have elite teams (or ones where everyone sucks), and it simply doesn't work at that granularity. It only works on a corporate-wide type of scale (or division).
Yes. So very much yes.

My last big corpo job which led to me leaving - they let go several engineers which I'd rank 9+/10 out of 10. Because that was the granular rule - must reduce headcount per group. Also, shot themselves in the foot, and reloaded, and tried for the other foot.

A couple now work for me in my little shop of horrors, and a couple other work directly for their direct competitors. Knowing those folks, I will smile and say "good luck".
 
Are you going to forget the laws we have now that the people didn't have back then? Unions are no longer even close to being useful like they were when started.
We have laws now? Oh well then everything is good, I mean I'm sure there are no states that have really relaxed laws involving overtime rules, health care requirements for employers, or silly things like maternity leave.

And while yeah things like child labor and workplace injury has largely been "fixed" by laws, you still have the elephant in the room which is a tech company wanting to unionize because they feel like the working conditions are deplorable. Sure it's not rip your arm off in a piece of industrial equipment bad, but they still don't like the way things are.
 
Yes. So very much yes.

My last big corpo job which led to me leaving - they let go several engineers which I'd rank 9+/10 out of 10. Because that was the granular rule - must reduce headcount per group. Also, shot themselves in the foot, and reloaded, and tried for the other foot.

A couple now work for me in my little shop of horrors, and a couple other work directly for their direct competitors. Knowing those folks, I will smile and say "good luck".
Yeah. One of the places I was at prior to now I was literally on the elite "ranger team" / "tiger team" / "go make this work" team - we had an almost unlimited travel budget, and I was overseas (Asia) out of Denver 2.5 out of every three weeks. The whole team was folks with double CCIEs, patents, VCDXes, etc - there literally was ~not~ a low-performer on the team (you couldn't be, or you wouldn't keep up), and anyone on that team could go collect 200k without blinking. They tried to stack rank us. We laughed and pointed at the revenue generation we did vs our (admittedly absurd) budget. They went away.
 
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