Activision Blizzard urges shareholders to vote against harassment report

As outlined in a report from Axios yesterday (May 2), a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing from last week says that the Activision Blizzard board “believes that, rather than diverting energy and resources toward creating yet another report, we should continue to directly respond to employee concerns.”

The vote from shareholders is set to take place during the annual company meeting on June 21. The entire board is unanimously against the notion of the report.

According to the filing, the report itself would include the amount of aggregate dollars settled by Activision Blizzard in relation to sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination cases over the last three years. It would also include the total number of pending cases, “pay and hours worked consolidated data” and the company’s progress towards reducing the average time it takes to resolve these cases.

The state of New York put forward the proposal on this potential report (thanks, Axios), which Activision Blizzard says may make it difficult for the company to retain and recruit employees “given the public walk-outs and unmet demands for change by its employees.”

“The proposed report itself,” adds the Activision Blizzard board, “even if completed after significant time and expense, would create a set of metrics that are simply not the best measures of how the company is responding to employee concerns.”

“The board is committed to measuring the speed and effectiveness of our changes accurately, not based on metrics that are not precisely tailored to our company’s situation.”

A representative from Activision Blizzard told Axios that it is “committed to transparency” and that it “intends to continue that approach in the future”.

The report also estimated that Activision Blizzard has negatively impacted 2,500 employees, with liability at around £745million ($930,320,000 USD).

In response, Activision Blizzard said the “speculative liability estimate appears to be based on faulty assumptions, inaccurate guesses about factual matters, and multiple mathematical errors.”

Back in July of last year Activision Blizzard was sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing over alleged sexual harassment, and then again in September by the SEC.

The situation at Activision Blizzard also involves ongoing labour organisation efforts at developer Raven Software, with its Quality Assurance department forming the Game Workers Alliance (GWA) after strikes over pay and workplace treatment. Now, the GWA and Raven Software will vote on the formation of the union thanks to the National Labour Relations Board, with the ballot count taking place on May 23.

In other news, Tenet and other movies have been put into the little Playdate handheld, and even the console’s crank has quite the use.