Blizzard Staff Called to Strike Over Versailles Closure

Earlier this month, Activision Blizzard Inc. communicated to employees working from their Versailles, France location that they would be closing the office, severing the U.S.-based game publisher’s last physical tie to France.

The Versailles office has primarily been a hub for marketing, customer support, and localizing work for the multiple languages into which Blizzard’s games were being translated. No stranger to downsizing and layoffs, the Versailles location employed approximately 400 people early in 2019 but was subject to restructuring and elimination of 134 of these 400 positions in mid-February 2019.

The recently announced closure follows on the heels of a history of uncertainty, lengthy negotiations, and unclear communication. Versailles employees watched the previous wave of layoffs from “limbo for months as Activision Blizzard negotiated with the government over severance.” By the beginning of 2020, many of these employees had left the office with compensation packages. Activision Blizzard also “quietly shut” its location in the World Trade Centre in The Hague earlier this year.

Originally, Activision Blizzard was in talks to move half the office to London from Versailles, plans that fell through between Brexit and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and ultimately led to the site’s announced closure.

Uncertainty and frustration permeate the air around the closure plans in Versailles. While French labor laws do require “significant compensation packages for employees caught up in mass layoffs,” it remains unclear how many employees will be laid off or moved to other locations.

This closure also coincides with a period of “record results” for Activision Blizzard’s earnings, a fact that reporters and union representatives of Blizzard employees have, rightly, not hesitated to point out. It seems clear that Activision Blizzard — and the mainstream video game industry more broadly — has benefited financially from work-from-home requirements and other periods of confinement and self-isolation.

Kotaku reminds us, meanwhile, that “these profits have not translated to better working conditions for the people who actually make the games.” In particular, they point to data from within the company demonstrating “a massive pay disparity between the executives […] and the folks working in quality assurance and customer support.”

The announcement has been answered by a trio of French labor unions: the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), SPECIS-UNSA (for employees and consultants working in IT and engineering), and CFE-CGC (for management and executive staff).

Their call upon Blizzard employees to strike in protest has been circulating on social media and the unions maintain that the company “repeatedly denied” the plans to shutter the Versailles office but have, in fact, been planning this closure for quite some time.

The unions’ statement further stresses that closing the Versailles office may cut as many as 285 jobs. This poses serious problems for employees who have uprooted their lives and moved to France for work, and who may have significant difficulties finding new employment due to a lack of forewarning and a deeply uncertain job market.

The unions additionally claim that, after several unsuccessful attempts to cut jobs in Versailles, management “willingly deteriorated work conditions” at significant cost to employees’ psychosocial wellbeing. In their statement, they further maintain that these working conditions led France’s Social and Economic Committee (CSE) to issue a “Droit d’alerte.”

This is a warning to an employer, issued when work conditions pose an imminent and grave danger to the life or health of employees or when protection systems for employees are found to be inadequate or defective.

Spokespeople for Activision Blizzard have told Gamasutra and Bloomberg that the closure and restructuring of European offices are being carried out to “better leverage talent, expertise and scale as [the company adapts] to the needs of a digitally focused industry.” The unions, meanwhile, conclude their statement by arguing that the closing of the Versailles office is instead a deliberate move to dodge European tax rules by moving to London.

As such, these three unions have called on Versailles’ Blizzard employees to strike as of October 14th to “defend our jobs and save our company,” demanding that the Versailles closure be canceled and that Activision Blizzard invest in developing the company’s Europe-based activities and inefficient prevention of psycho-social risks to Blizzard employees.