Activision vs. CA UPDATE Employees Planning Walk Out

Noting you still haven’t pointed out anything he has said that was sexist.

Seems like that should be an easy thing to do, right?

Wouldn’t want anyone doubting your accusation, right?

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Notglinda obviously. I agree, the racist would never admit to it. As they arent doing so right now. How is calling like it is bias? Its called having objective standards and seeing particular groups fail those standards to a higher degree compared to most, and then nobody calling them out on it is whats ridiculous

Imagine thinking anybody who disagrees with you and calls you out on your BS is a white supremacist. Stop thinking your favored group of people are above criticism for their terrible behavior. And also, lol at the fact that you think all of the riots that have happened over the past years are just “shadows”. The amount of kool aid you drink is amazing

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Haha got em.

What did I do to get it reported?

You spoke out against the man.

Just updated the title to reflect more of what’s going on. Some internal miscommunications about what’s being relayed to the public, versus the sentiment felt by staff. It’s to the point where workers for Blizzard are planning a walk out to protest the actions of the company.

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Before they walk out, can they fix the invisible belt bug that happens with some tabards (like guild tabards)? It’s been week since it was reported.

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93 thousand other bugs causing issues in game… Would be nice, but we cant have nice things and quality because This is an Activision product not a Private server.

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Your boss and their boss are into politics. You should be too.

(rather tangential, maybe OT, but…)

I don’t understand how that article ties the administration to “wildfire prevention tool” suspension…

It literally says in the article:

Decisions about whether to suspend burns are at the discretion of regional offices, the USFS said.

All the article gives as reason is:

“Safety of the public and our wildland fire responders is priority number one,” said Jonathan Groveman, a spokesman for the Forest Service in California, whose office suspended controlled burns at the end of March.

“Forest Service in California”…what’s that even mean? Presumably the USFS in CA?

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I think this is the biggest thing.

The lawsuit isn’t some libel being pushed by a journalist trying to pin some celebrity or politician with heresay.

The state of CA is suing Activision/Blizzard directly. Not an individual, but the company itself.

There is an overwhelmingly good chance that the state in a state court has enough evidence to follow through and win.

And it doesn’t take much from any individual to investigate how scummy Acti/Blizz treats its employees anyway – most of which are paid next to nothing (already illegal), and are instead paid commission on the success of the products they are working on, forcing them to work extreme hours and many cases live in their cars.

I’m the least bit surprised the higher ups and corporate culture is full of degenerates that would lead to state lawsuit of discrimination / harassment.

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I think the confusion is that 57% of California’s forests are federal land.

“California officials said they disagreed with the decisions and were continuing their own forest management work on state lands through the pandemic.”

And if that happens, what does Blizzard do next? File for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy?

No, they would just lose a ton of money and be forced to make good games have angry off share holders.

It would force a shakeup at acti/blizz, most likely for the better.

If they are forced to remove bad managers or higher ups b/c they lost a ton of money, the company itself would need to focus on making good products that sell rather than MTX’s to make back revenue.

Activison/Blizz losing this lawsuit means their current MO of screw the players, just focus on profits is not working. And if they lose SOO much that they need to downsize or sell off IPs, even better.

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This is always a poor assumption. The State can very easily overstep itself on little to no evidence at all (see: criminal cases in jurisdictions across the country) and hope for an early settlement based almost entirely on the threat of what could come out of the other side of trial. There’s a reason seeing the inside of a courtroom is insanely rare relative to the amount of filings (not even counting disputes that could be filed in court). The risk vs what you can pay now to make it all go away while admitting no fault is hard to pass up on.

That being said, in this case specifically the State’s initial filing is beyond weak. Very few instances listed in the original complaint have anything resembling verifiable facts (names, dates, places, etc, things that let the Defendant and Court know what the hell they’re talking about), and the two biggest point to Alex Afrasiabi (who is already fired) and an unnamed employee who has regrettably committed suicide. The rest could honestly point to anyone until further information is given undercuts the seriousness of this whole ordeal. If they had a lot of smoking guns, they’d have shown them off already.

This is all irrelevant and is clouding your, and a lot of other peoples’, judgment about this thing. Paying people low wages isn’t facially illegal so long as you’re above minimum wage and any other required salary laws. Someone getting paid less than they think they deserve given the area they live in and the job they do is solved not in the courts, but by re-negotiating your contract or quitting for a new job.

Video game workers aren’t the only seat-of-their-pants workers in America.

“They’re bad about thing X, so I’ll assume they’re bad about thing Y” is precisely why we have lawsuits and not judgment-by-social-media.

This is the exact sort of thing you learn early on in Rules of Evidence that you’re not allowed to dredge up in a courtroom. Someone’s past thievery doesn’t mean jack squat in a present assault case, and bringing it up to paint them as a generally “bad person” is strictly against the rules in 90% of jurisdictions (I hedge because some county out there probably allows it like the neanderthals they are). This is the same reason you can’t go after a woman’s past sexual history when talking about a present sexual assault case to try to taint her testimony that she’s a promiscuous person, it only serves to taint the jury and offers no probative value.

All of this being said, it’ll be infinitely more interesting when Activision-Blizzard files their answer. They have to make some kind of reply (confirm/deny) to each allegation and also get a chance to offer up their own evidence, as well as any defenses. This is all procedure laden and they may very well throw some stuff up there that won’t get used later but they don’t want to waive them in case they do want to use them. Defenses work like this for the most part, where you can’t rely upon some defenses later if you don’t flag the Court and the Plaintiff to those defenses early enough.

Since the FEHA statute is code laden, there are a lot of things I suspect ActBlizz to bring as defenses at least. Statute of limitations and failure to state a claim are likely going to see some use since there are limits on how far back you can go and the State didn’t really put dates which renders a lot of their claims very indefinite.

Should be interesting!

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The point I was making is people that control more assets then us are very interested in politics. And for good reason.

Frustrates me to no end when folks turn this into a sex thing and say women are somehow paid less than men.

If that were true, only women would ever be hired since it would allow your business to maximize its profits by paying all their workers less.

Are they actually being accused of the suicide? Seems to me that’s just a taint and really cannot be proven in any way, shape, or form. I mean even if the person in question made a pre-suicide video or recording saying, “this is why I did it” it’s not like that’s definitive proof that Blizzard told anyone to off themselves or gave them the means to do it.

Another thing is that you’d have to establish a pattern of behavior on Blizzard’s part. But this was one person. One person out of a thousand. You can’t really isolate one case and assume Blizzard is culpable.

Something people need to understand here is that the stresses of a variety of jobs can cause people to commit suicide. This is just a fact of life and it happens universally, not just in California or in the US. It is particularly true in the military given the stresses there. In no way does this mean the job itself or the people working there are responsible for anyone’s capacity to commit suicide. In fact, most often when people show such tendencies, they’re going to be let go because the desire to commit suicide is considered a sign of mental illness.

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It happens more often than you think, but generally speaking it comes from places where people are expected to negotiate their salaries to a point and women (statistically speaking) are less likely to negotiate at all, let alone as high as men. At what point this becomes a sex-based discrimination I do not know, but I have a feeling that California is a bit stricter on this matter than other jurisdictions.

That being said, a lot of these “He got paid more than me!!” scenarios are going to play out as Employee X thought Employee Y earned more, or got promoted faster, or had less experience, etc, but in reality Employee Y actually was due for whatever it is they got or Employee X is just flat out wrong.

The suicide is tied explicitly to the relationship she had with her supervisor. Tellingly, they don’t say that the relationship with the supervisor was inappropriate, coercive, predatory, etc. They just say it existed. Then, without actually connecting the dots, they offhandedly claim that at a Christmas party prior to the suicide, allegedly nudes were passed around of the deceased. The complaint even says it in a really mealymouthed manner too, stating that an employee heard/thought that the action happened, but not that they knew for sure or that they saw it happening or anything of the sort.

Trying to pin the suicide on Blizzard is scummy unless they have smoking gun evidence (which is highly doubtful). A simple affidavit by the ex-boyfriend/supervisor that claims she had been struggling with X or Y problem and wasn’t looking forward to the trip would throw a permanent wrench into the works.

This is the evergreen challenge of proving hostile work environment claims.

  • The environment needs to be actually hostile (term of art, means more than just angry/evil people)
  • The hostility (term of art) needs to be related to a suspect classification (race/gender/religion/etc)
  • The hostility needs to actually have an impact on those who share those suspect classifications

So if you just have a jackass boss who is kinda mean to everyone, you lose.

If you have a jackass boss who picks favorites, but never along suspect classification lines, you lose.

If you have a jackass boss who does do something blatantly regarding a suspect classification, but it was a once/twice only thing before being corrected/reprimanded, you lose.

If you have members of the suspect classification who were entirely unaffected by the behavior or worse, clueless to it, you lose.

If you have members that had no idea anything was hostile (term of art) in the first place, you lose.

On cross, my first go-to with any hostile work environment claim was to ask the employee or former employee what they thought of the alleged evil supervisor. They’d usually tell me all kinds of sordid details. I’d then ask if anyone liked the supervisor, and I’d almost without fail get a litany of people that also hated the supervisor (who also weren’t members of the suspect classification). Witnesses love to overshare and exaggerate, and in this case it ruins the whole case.

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Ultimately, leads to extremely clinical work environments.

Men will refuse to train women because of fear of some kind of reprisal for any perceived wrongdoing. Men will refuse to discipline women or will discipline women with several witnesses present for the same reasons. The severity of the discipline to women may also vary for the same reasons.

And you can replace “women” with a variety of other classifications.

Meanwhile any class of person who knows they’re not considered “marginalized” is going to be put on high alert. They’re going to police themselves because they know they’re considered “suspect” for simply having been associated with an “oppressor” class.

Particularly why I hate it when certain jobs I’ve worked at want to have out-of-workplace functions involving employees such as a picnics, Christmas parties, or whatever. I used to go to these, but later discovered it just makes things awkward during regular workplace interactions where everyone is expected to become a robot once again with regard to any interactions.

I’ve found people are more trustworthy if they don’t smile versus those who do. And those who smile all the time are liars.

Would you please consider donating some gold to my foundation?

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-necessity-of-inclusivity-now-more-than-ever-dont-back-down/1052979/13