The ongoing efforts by several dozen quality assurance testers at Raven Software, the Activision Blizzard subsidiary which develops Call of Duty games, to collectively bargain hit a speedbump on Tuesday, as the parent company declined the testers’ request for voluntary recognition. The saga originated early last month, when Activision unexpectedly discharged almost a third of its QA department after weeks of promising pay hikes. Those employees who survived the purge walked off the job in protest, which escalated into a strike that ultimately lasted several weeks. Upon returning to work, the employees announced they had formed a union, and it was their request for recognition thereof that Activision rebuffed yesterday. Now, then, testers intend to file an election petition with the NLRB.

In other union news, thousands of employees at dozens of King Sooper’s locations across Colorado voted to ratify a new contract with the company, which the union had tentatively accepted last week to end a ten-day strike, as I covered earlier this month. In the contract, the employees secured impressive pay gains, which their union characterized as “the most significant wage increases ever secured by a UFCW local for grocery workers.”

In a piece published yesterday, the New York Times observed that the resurgence of labor agitation in 2021 failed to reverse the trajectory of union density’s decades-long descent. “The prominence of these organizing efforts,” the Times clarifies, “obscures the steady downward trend of union membership in the United States for more than four decades.”

In—somewhat ironically—related news, the NewsGuild of New York-CWA, representing some 1,300 journalists and editorial employees at the NYT, filed an unfair labor practice charge against the Times on Tuesday. The charge accuses the company of excluding unionized employees from certain paid holidays it extended to the rest of the workforce. A spokesperson for the publisher dismissed the allegations as “categorically false.”

At Harvard, following nearly four months of negotiations, approximately 200 security guards represented by 32BJ SEIU rejected a contract offer from Securitas USA, as Sophia Scott of the Harvard Crimson scooped earlier today. A member of 32BJ’s bargaining committee, which opposed the contract proposal, blasted Securitas’ offer as “insulting.” “We’re not asking for one million dollars,” insisted another; only “a decent contract” and “fair treatment.” A majority of the guards have signaled support for a strike, but the union has so far declined to initiate one. For the time being, then, the guards on campus will continue to work without the protections of a union contract, for their CBA with Securitas expired two weeks ago.