Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale
Yesterday, July the 28th, many of Activision’s 9,500 workers walked off the job to protest the culture of harassment and discrimination present at the company. Activision Blizzard is currently being sued by the state of California over alleged sexual harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture. The complaint from California asserts that “[f]emale employees receive lower starting pay and also earn less than male employees for substantially similar work.”
The lawsuit shows wide-ranging discrimination towards women from the company. The complaint notes that the company is “only 20 percent women.” Its top leadership is also “exclusively male and white,” and that “very few women ever reach top roles in the company.” The women who do reach higher roles earn less salary, incentive pay, and total compensation than their male peers, as evidenced in Activision’s own records.
Activision has called in the experts to put down the claims of sexual harassment and discrimination and stop the protests by workers. Activision has hired WilmerHale. WilmerHale has been hired to “review” Activision’s policies. Wilmerhale’s own site advertises its expertise as “union awareness and avoidance.” They use attorneys and experts to develop “union avoidance strategies and union organizational campaigns.” WilmerHale was used extensively by Amazon to spread anti-union misinformation and propaganda to “sow doubts about the unionization drive.” WilmerHale was the firm that killed unionization efforts at an Amazon center in Bessemer, Alabama.
WilmerHale says its practices help “clients minimize liability so they can stay focused on their business objectives.” That means your company can exploit its workers and weasel its way out of any accountability with WilmerHale’s army of lawyers. WilmerHale is the Pinkertons of our time. They swapped out their rifles and shotguns for court affidavits to threaten workers into silence. Activision is facing the crop it sowed, for years it created a culture of sexual harassment and discrimination, and now that it’s time for justice they call in the big guns of the labor law world to duck out of accountability. Any worker at any company deserves better than watching their boss abuse them then sneak out of any justice thanks to being outmaneuvered in the legal world. At WilmerHale, 1st-year counsel makes $350,000. The 1st year associate walks into the office in a $1,500 Burberry suit and makes $202,500 that year. Those Amazon workers they swindled out of higher wages make less than $30,000 a year.
Are we going to watch as that same insult to justice happens at Activision now?
