This week Bloomberg revealed that there is a employee revolt in progress at Blizzard Entertainment. While Blizzard is famous for video game franchises such as Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Overwatch, they are equally infamous for overworking their employees and paying below industry wages.
For the last few years as Activision become more involved in the day to day operations at Blizzard, layoffs, poor management, austerity measures, lack of adequate pay raises and the high cost of living in Orange county have negatively impacted the morale of rank and file Blizzard employees.
The Value of Having Blizzard on Your Resume
For years it has been widely known that Blizzard pays well below the industry standard wages to their employees. How do they get away with it? Easy. Recruiters know that the cachet of the Blizzard name and the status one gets having worked at Blizzard, is very valuable to have on your resume. This is the proverbial carrot they dangle to all prospective employees.
After few minutes spent on the Glassdoor website reading Blizzard employee reviews, one soon learns that one of the biggest worker complaints is about the low salaries at Blizzard, the high cost of living in Orange county, and non-existent work/life balance. This is not a new phenomenon as this has been the case for many years.
Blizzard is well aware of this but they apparently don’t care. They have been quite content to use their reputation as a studios that makes outstanding video games, as an excuse to pay lower than industry standard wages to save money. Meanwhile, as Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick — the most hated CEO in the video game business — was reported to have made $40 million in 2019, employees are so poorly paid they can’t even afford to buy lunch in the Blizzard campus cafeteria.
From an article at Business Insider:
But some employees at Blizzard — the studio responsible for hits like “World of Warcraft,” “Overwatch,” and the upcoming “Diablo 4” — said they were paid so poorly that they used free office coffee as an appetite suppressant, skipped meals in the employee cafeteria, and, in one case, chose not to have kids due to an inability to afford them.
While Employees Go Hungry Activision/Blizzard Gives Millions to Activists
While Blizzard employees are going hungry and trying to make ends meet, Activision/Blizzard has been giving millions of dollars of donations to various black activist groups all in the name of “fighting against systemic inequality.”
Here’s another Tweet where Activision/Blizzard claims to “prioritize the health and care of employees and their families.” Naturally, the article was authored by none other than the notorious ninja master of puff pieces — Dean Takahashi — Blizzard’s unofficial PR man and apologist who is currently posing as a journalist for Venturebeat:
If Blizzard really cared about their employees, they would pay them a living wage that is at least equal to the industry standard. Blizzard doesn’t give a damn about their employees. It’s far easier to Tweet about diversity, inclusion, and PRIDE parades than it is to actually pay them a fair wage.
The White Fragility Con Game
After the death of George Floyd and the BLM/ANTIFA riots, it now seems that Blizzard has a bottomless pit of money to throw away on vanity virtue signaling. Recently Activision paid race huslter and identity politics grifter Robin D’Angelo to indoctrinate and brainwash Activison/Blizzard employees on the repugnant, racist concept of white fragility:
D’Angelo is all the rage in progressive circles and apparently charges a cool $6,000 per speech “educating” people about the imaginary problem of systemic racism in America.
In this video, Ben Shapiro obliterates the bogus notion of white fragility:
Here’s yet another video where The Hill interviews Rolling Stone journalist Matt Tiabi on the very same subject:
One commentor on the Matt Tiabbi video brilliantly summed up D’Angelo’s specious claim:
Circular reasoning: if you admit you’re a racist, you’ve proved her point; if you deny you’re a racist, you’re fragile, you’ve proved her point. Heads she wins, tails you lose.
Conclusion
In all of the reporting and analysis, I have yet to see anyone mention the outrageous hypocrisy of Activation/Blizzard treating their employees like slaves and simultaneously paying millions of dollars to various racial and gender activist groups as well as paying the bloated salaries of useless diversity and inclusion VPs and managers.
Question: If Activision claims to care about the problem of inequality, why have they failed to address the wage inequality that they have imposed on their own employees?
Answer: Activation and their investors only care about profit. A few million dollars of bribes and extortion money paid to keep race hustlers quiet, is peanuts compared to having to pay your employees a fair industry standard wage. But who needs money when Activision/Blizzard cares™ and gives their employees free trinkets and swag.
This is a company that is so appalling and miserly that they refuse to pay for their employees lunch.
Think of how many lunches that Activision/Blizzard could buy for their employees with the $4 million they are throwing away for virtue signaling purposes?
I did the math.
At $5 dollars per lunch, $4 million would pay for a total of 800,000 lunches. Activision/Blizzard claims to have 9,000 employees. Those employees would get approximately 89 free lunches each. That’s almost 2 free lunches per week.
If Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick took a pay cut of $11,250,000 from his estimated $40 million salary, that would pay for the lunch of all 9,000 employees for 50 weeks a year (accounting for 2 weeks of vacation).
Free lunch for all employees would boost morale and improve productivity and employees would have more energy to make better video games. Better video games would increase profits. More importantly, employees would have more disposable income and feel much better about working at Blizzard. But this is only the start, Blizzard can certainly afford to play their employees industry standard wages.
Please do the right thing Bobby.
#BlizzardLivesMatter
