>> PAYTON: No one wants to work these days.

How many times have you heard that over the past year or so, and it just made you want to pull your own hair out?

Because in reality, a deadly pandemic and political -- we'll go with uneasiness, has led a large number of people to reconsider what they want out of their careers.

In this past year, we've seen workers coming together in solidarity in pop culture industries we often take for granted.

And one of the biggest seismic shifts came from right here in the Midwest.

♪ >> PAYTON: Hello and welcome to "Flyover Culture," your guided tour of pop culture in the Midwest.

I'm Payton Whaley.

Video games, comics, tabletop games, they are all things I covered to death on here, and they seem like dream jobs.

It's wild to think about contributing to an art form that gives you so much joy, but there's a dark side to it too.

Way too often those dream jobs in pop culture and entertainment get twisted to exploit the people making what the rest of us love so much.

The idea that anyone would kill to work here gets held over people's heads like an ax just waiting to fall.

And what comes of it is low wages, long hours, and very crappy quality of life.

That's why this May, quality assurance workers at Raven Software, up in Middleton, Wisconsin, cast an historic vote to unionize, becoming the first of its kind at a company this size in the games industry.

The kicker is that Raven is owned by Activision Blizzard, a publisher with offices and studios around the world, capping out at nearly 10,000 employees.

And if you've been following Activision Blizzard in the news this past year or so, you will get why this union called the Game Workers Alliance, felt such a dire need to organize.

Activision Blizzard, the company behind behemoths like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, and way too many others to name, has been in the spotlight quite a bit, and for all the wrong reasons.

The issues at Activision Blizzard go back years, but this stretch kicks off almost exactly a year ago when California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the company for violating several laws.

There's a ton to unpack in the suit, and I will have some sources in the description, but in short, it describes a long history of discrimination and harassment against female employees and a pervasive frat boy culture.

There's a lot of harrowing stuff in there, and probably enough for its own video.

But it's around the time of the lawsuit when Jessica Gonzalez, a union organizer and founder of both the Game Workers Alliance and A Better ABK tells me Raven's organizing efforts began in earnest.

>> My name is Jessica Gonzalez.

I am a campaign organizer with CWA, which is Communication Workers of America.

I was a game developer for seven years.

I worked for Activision Blizzard, Treyarch, a lot of the subsidiaries, and the lawsuit news happened, and I became an activist and I led the first walkout.

>> PAYTON: This particular group of employees at Raven do quality assurance or QA testing on Call of Duty: Warzone, the immeasurably profitable Battle Royale spinoff of the first-person shooter.

So sniffing out bugs in the game, and making sure it works.

>> It's very much technical.

You are doing a lot of work.

You have insane attention to detail.

You have to write detailed reports.

You have to follow-up on, you know, new code that was put into the game, making sure it doesn't regress and break other parts of the game.

So it's very much technical role.

>> PAYTON: I reached out to Game Workers Alliance a few times for comment, but did not hear back in time for this video.

While Jessica wasn't a Raven employee, she has a history in QA elsewhere in Activision Blizzard, and the sad reality is that QA staff are often treated like second-class citizens.

>> When I started, QA was in a dungeon, and very, like, separated from -- like, we couldn't use the same elevators as the other devs.

If we had, like, overtime and they gracefully bought food, we would have to wait until all the devs ate the food, and then, you know, it would be cold which is fine, right, but we're all right, cool, we'll get leftovers, whatever.

At the time, you're just so grateful.

You are, like, oh, my god, I get to work at a game.

So it's weird.

It's, like, that weird power dynamic where when you're in it, you're just, like, oh, my god, thank you for, like, feeding us.

>> PAYTON: Following that initial lawsuit was an avalanche of mess.

More allegations, more investigations, more lawsuits, and no shortage of people in and outside the company demanding CEO Bobby Kotick's resignation.

In the meantime, QA staff at Raven were going through it.

December saw a dozen layoffs in that department, despite Call of Duty: Warzone, the game they worked on, being massively profitable.

>> They get, like, millions, billions of dollars on games like Warzone.

>> PAYTON: Right.

>> And then it's, like, why does it make sense to layoff 12 people in a pandemic when your game is making billions of dollars.

Like, it just doesn't make sense.

Record profits, and then laying people off, like, come on, that's clearly unpaid wages.

>> PAYTON: To send a message, Raven employees and others at Activision Blizzard staged a walkout.

This also saw the begins of A Better ABK, which Gonzalez says acts as a mouthpiece for employees to have a voice to the outside world.

>> They are trying to, like, sweep it under the rug.

So we created A Better ABK on Twitter.

Put messaging out there that we are the employees.

We are the people that are dealing with these issues.

We are going to tell you when they are fixed, you know?

So that's really why A Better ABK is around, and it really is to share that messaging of, like, organizing efforts.

Here's our initiatives.

Here's our strike fund.

Here's our, you know, walkout information, et cetera.

Leadership is going to do the legal minimum versus ethical maximum.

>> PAYTON: And in January, QA employees at Raven, announced their intentions to unionize.

That's about when Gonzalez got involved.

>> Organizations started when the strike started.

So my friend was saying, hey, I have Raven people that need help now, and we were already organizing under ABK.

So I said, okay, I will jump on a call with them.

We figured out a strike fund.

Like, I set up a GoFundMe for them.

I -- overnight, we set up this thing, and then I just said, okay.

Start going into organizing meetings with CWA.

Like, here's a rep who is in your area.

They had a supermajority.

So they were ready to ask for voluntary recognition.

They asked for voluntary recognition in January, you know, end the strike in good faith saying that we're going to, you know, end the strike.

We're in good faith.

Please recognize our union.

Of course, they got ignored.

>> PAYTON: All of this gets more complicated set against the backdrop of Microsoft's January announcement to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, which is so much money!

With Raven's talk of unionizing its QA department, Activision Blizzard said in April it would be promoting all of its North American QA workers from contractors to full time with a pay bump.

That is, everyone except the ones unionizing at Raven.

Activision Blizzard had also tried to contest the union vote at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in February, arguing that how the company is structured meant all of Raven, not just the QA department, should vote.

To which the NLRB said, yeah, no.

So the vote was set for lay May when the group made history and officially formed the union in a 19-3 vote.

>> And they're just rock stars.

Like, I feel like they walked so the rest of ABK could run.

I feel like we were already kind of slowly working on organizing, but they really said, no, we are going to show the solidarity part first, and then y'all can follow along if you want.

>> PAYTON: The road to organizing in these pop culture industries is very rough, but the folks at Raven aren't the only ones seeing success.

Another game developer, albeit a smaller one, called Vodeo Games, unionized late last year.

And in January, workers at Image Comics certified Comic Book Workers United.

It kind of feels like unionization efforts are having a real moment here.

>> I would love to see it, like, the films industry, where it's just, like, all unionized, and you can just keep pulling from really good talent, instead of meat grinding talent and having, like, a revolving door and burning people out, because it happens way too much.

And we would just have better games if people were happy.

It's absolutely not a cure-all.

We don't need perfect.

We just need better.

We need better conditions.

We need conditions that are going to protect developers that aren't going to, like, burn us all out, and allow us to have families at the same time, allow us to have proper healthcare.

We are not going to get better, unless we band together and ask for better, because legally they don't have to listen to us right now, you know?

I think a lot of corporations are scared because worker power absolutely matters.

>> PAYTON: What's next for the folks at GWA and Raven?

Well, most recently Microsoft entered a neutrality agreement with the Communication Workers of America, to say it would not interfere if workers wanted to join the CWA.

And earlier in June, CEO Bobby Kotick said Activision Blizzard would recognize the union and soon be entering negotiations.

With this month being the anniversary of the initial lawsuit, employees at Activision Blizzard across the country are holding another walkout on the 21st.

No matter what happens, Jessica says the work done by GWA is a huge source of encouragement for the rest of the industry.

>> It's exciting, right?

It's a beacon of light.

It's something that says, hey, like, yes, we are notoriously treated really bad in the industry, but we are going to fight for better conditions.

And I think, you know, other orgs and QA are starting to see that too.

So I think it's like a bit of hope for the industry.

>> PAYTON: Thank you to Jessica Gonzalez for talking with me for this story.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you next time.