In a surprising move, the AFL-CIO has released a letter supporting Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, and criticizing the FTC’s decision to block the purchase from going through.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations is a collective of worker unions and organizations all across America. As a labor group made of other labor groups, they take direct actions with the purpose of helping workers secure their rights.
One of the members under this group is the Communication Workers of America, a fact that is relevant to this sudden action. But first, let us look at what the AFL-CIO said in their letter:
As you may have noted, the AFL-CIO namedrop both the Communication Workers of America and the European Commission. The European Commission is not done in their investigation of this purchase. However, they did send a correction to the FTC, pointing out that they approved Microsoft’s purchase of Zenimax without any concessions. The EU believes that there would be no competition concerns for that purchase regardless of what Microsoft did with the company and their games.
The Communication Workers of America has a more direct connection to this story, and to Activision Blizzard King itself.
This CWA has been working on behalf of Raven Software and Blizzard Albany, two developer groups under Activision that successfully unionized. Activision has been facing a harassment and discrimination lawsuit related to this unionization. In their most recent action, current Activision management, not Microsoft, sued California’s Civil Rights Department for mishandling this harassment suit.
To make things simple, union groups like the AFL-CIO and CWA have been fighting with Activision for some time now over the unionization of their workers. These actions by the AFL-CIO reflect their belief that the current management at Activision will continue to block any attempts of their workers to lobby for their rights or unionize.
This was not a random or spur of the moment decision by these union organizations to join Microsoft. As we reported earlier this month, the CWA takes Microsoft’s leadership in good faith, and would prefer that they take over management of Activision Blizzard King. This would also be consistent with Microsoft’s recent history of working with unions.
But for what it’s worth, the letter shared by the AFL-CIO also suggests that the workers themselves do not believe there are competition concerns for the acquisition, at least when it comes to the workers at these game companies.
It may certainly be a surprising turn of affairs, but this added dimension may also turn things around when it comes to getting this acquisition approved.
Source: AFL-CIO
