- An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current and future. Arbitration clauses protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution.
- The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization. Current practices have led to women, in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups that are vulnerable to gender discrimination not being hired fairly for new roles when compared to men.
- Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company. Current practices have led to aforementioned groups not being paid or promoted fairly.
- Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK’s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff. It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.
Fire Bobby Kotick
Every so often there is a post that I end up not making, largely because I was not really certain how to approach it. Essentially for me this has been a year without Blizzard games. This is due in part to some intentional and some unintentional avoiding of anything that comes from the Battle.net launcher. Recently I had thought about beginning to lay down my sword and accept that change was happening, because from the outside it seemed like things were beginning to move in the right direction. Then a few things happened, firstly the resignation of Jen O’Neal and the Wall Street Journal article expanding on that action and the fact that Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard has been complicit in everything up to this point. As part of everything coming out we find out that Kotick actually wrote the awful Fran Townsend letter, which brings into question if Jen O’Neal had anything to do with the public resignation letter in the first place.
This has been a journey that began with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit in July, and has been a ride of various bits of information coming out from that process. As a reaction to all of this a group of Activision, Blizzard, and King employees have banded together to create the ABetterABK movement, and held a number of walkouts. They have some pretty straight forward demands: