![]() “Corporations choose to be disruptive when they run anti-union campaigns,” says Beth Allen, communications director for the CWA. Kotick believes labor organizers are influencing the state and federal investigations into harassment and gender discrimination claims, as well as the Activision employee walkouts that have been staged periodically since 2021. The Communications Workers of America and Activision employees have filed a stream of complaints against the company with the National Labor Relations Board. Kotick places the blame for most of Activision’s image problems on what he calls “outside forces” and labor activity around the company. “But what we did have was a very aggressive labor movement working hard to try and destabilize the company.” We didn’t have any of what were mischaracterizations reported in the media,” Kotick asserts. And we did not have a systemic issue with harassment - ever. “We’ve had every possible form of investigation done. Though he says he’ll release a transparency report that will provide exculpatory data from outside entities, he acknowledges that the stain left by the sweeping allegations will be hard to combat with pie charts and statistical tables. He says that the company is preparing to release a slew of data drawn from the EEOC investigation that he hopes will combat the perception that Activision was run as a “frat house.”įor a company with 17,000 employees worldwide, Kotick asserts, Activision has had a relatively low level of harassment and assault complaints. ![]() He makes no apologies for Activision or its culture. ![]() The executive says he has been both humbled and outraged by what he considers malicious distortions about the company that he has taken to great heights over 32 years. In a lawsuit filed against Activision in 2021, California’s Civil Rights Department alleges that “women were subjected to constant sexual harassment, including groping, comments, and advances, and that the company’s executives and human resources personnel knew of the harassment and failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the unlawful conduct, and instead retaliated against women who complained.” The complaint also accused Activision of having “fostered a sexist culture and paid women less than men, and assigned women to lower level jobs than men.” Last year, Activision filed a counterclaim against the Civil Rights Department, accusing it of ethical lapses in its investigation and of attempting to interfere with the separate EEOC investigation and $18 million settlement reached in September 2021. Kotick has been accused of turning a blind eye and failing to act to address internal culture issues, particularly at the Blizzard unit. What’s more, Activision Blizzard over the past five years has been the focus of harassment and gender equality probes from an alphabet soup of federal and state agencies, from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission to California’s Civil Rights Department. He’s in a similar predicament to the one that AT&T and Time Warner were five years ago, as he’s spent the past 18 months (and counting) lobbying regulators to approve the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft for $69 billion in cash. Kotick, 60, is remarkably sanguine for a CEO fighting battles on multiple fronts. But during the first half of 2018, when the fate of the $85.4 billion Time Warner purchase hung in the balance, Activision Blizzard took a cue from its “Call of Duty” commandos: It stockpiled financial ammunition and waited patiently for an opening to pounce. In reality, the Justice Department lost its lawsuit to block the sale of Time Warner to AT&T. They’d take our IP and turn it into film and television, and we’d have an extraordinary company,” Kotick says, sketching out his vision for a deal in an alternate universe in which AT&T never bought Time Warner and Activision took it on instead. “We’d take their IP and turn it into games. The quiet in the building and the low midafternoon light give the place a slightly spooky, fun house vibe. Huge replicas of characters and actual backdrops from the video game giant’s roster of franchises - including Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch and Candy Crush - dot the landscape of the open-architecture space. It’s a Friday afternoon in mid-April, which means the office is mostly deserted. The CEO of Activision Blizzard drops this nugget early on while sitting at the company’s Santa Monica headquarters for his first extensive interview since 2012. Bobby Kotick has a secret: He was ready to buy Time Warner a few years ago.
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