Following ex-CEO Bobby Kotick describing legal action taken against his former company Activision Blizzard as “fake lawsuits”, which he claims were driven by a union’s “plan” to increase its membership numbers, the ABK Workers Alliance has responded via social media.
“The trauma, discrimination, and abuse that our coworkers and former coworkers endured is not fake or a “plan to drive union membership”, it wrote, “Our unions were born from the very real and harmful way executives reacted when made aware of these situations.
“The executives of our company did not protect us, and often made the situation worse or directly perpetuated the harm. That is why we decided to stand up for ourselves and make our company better, a place where we truly lived by our core values and looked out for one another.
“A common misinformation tactic used by companies during a union campaign is to assert that a union is a third party that comes in and makes changes. This is not true. The workers are the union. We are not a third party looking for companies to prey on. We are workers with a vested interest in making our company the best it can be.”
www.eurogamer.net/bobby-kotick…The trauma, discrimination, and abuse that our coworkers and former coworkers endured is not fake or a "plan to drive union membership". Our unions were born from the very real and harmful way executives reacted when made aware of these situations.
— ABetterABK – ABK Workers Alliance 💙 (@abetterabk.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T21:26:42.616Z
Kotick’s comments came on the Grit Podcast of American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. He said of a 2021 petition signed by over 1000 current and former Activision Blizzard employees which criticised the company’s response to the discrimination and harassment lawsuit filed against it by the state of California, “That was fake”.
“I can tell you exactly what happened,” the former CEO stated, “The Communication Workers of America union started looking at technology. They kept losing because they represented the News Guild, Comcast, and they realised they were losing members at a really dramatic rate, so they gotta figure out how do they get new union members? So they first targeted a bunch of different businesses – Google, some other tech companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and us.”
“It’s the power of unions. I didn’t really understand this until we went through this process. They were able to get a government agency, the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] and a state employment agency called the Department of Fair Employment and Housing [DFEH], to file fake lawsuits against companies like us and Riot Games making allegations about the workplace that didn’t… they weren’t true, but they were able to do this.”
“They came up with this plan, hired a PR firm, and they started attacking our company,” Kotick claimed, “They got these two agencies to file these lawsuits to claimed there was some sexual harassment at the company. We didn’t have any of that, and ultimately they had to admit that this was not truthful and withdraw the complaints.”
Both lawsuits were settled by Activision Blizzard, with payouts being made to claimants in the suits and the California Civil Rights Department stating as part of this that “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations [of] systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard”.
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