Last week, Proletariat's proposed union withdrew its petition to the NLRB to hold a unionization vote. The CWA noted Proletariat's CEO responded to the petition with "confrontational tactics," holding a series of meetings that "demoralized and disempowered" employees "making a free and fair election impossible."
The fallout of that move continues this week as former employees express their displeasure at the outcome on social media. Benny Wilson, a senior graphics engineer at Proletariat, accused the studio of allowing a toxic work environment where racism and sexism occur "in the open."
"I’ve seen Seniors yelling at young employees, women crying in meetings, 'fat lady' jokes," wrote Wilson on Twitter. "White men have doubted my experiences with racism, they disagree with me when I say the studio isn’t inclusive. This all happens in the open. Everyone sees it."
Wilson noted that female employees have told him "that they’ve been spoken over in meetings, yelled at, and shut down while managers watch." Multiple reports to HR and managers over the years have been for naught, with Wilson saying the company hasn't progressed at all since they joined Proletariat in 2019.
In a follow-up tweet, Wilson revealed an employee was ridiculed for saying they were struggling mentally, while another tweet shows a complaint made to Blizzard HR as late as January 11. In a statement to Games Industry.biz, Wilson stated one of Proletariat's founders mocked a union organizer in the company slack channel after they quit after the union petition was dropped. Employees then called out this co-founder's comments, but another found "said that staffers were hand-wringing over sarcastic comments."
Wilson told Blizzard HR that they'll be working on their resume after the latest complaint, hinting Proletariat is about to lose another talented employee. This comes after a former Blizzard manager said that the World of Warcraft developer is being "torn apart from the inside" by managers and executives setting unreasonable workplace conditions and a stack-ranking policy that hurt many employees' possible advancement.