In organizing news, the collective bargaining aspirations of several dozen quality assurance testers at Raven Software, the Activision Blizzard subsidiary tasked with developing the popular Call of Duty video games, were temporarily blocked on Tuesday, as the company declined their request for voluntary recognition.

Activision touched off the sage last month by unexpectedly discharging nearly a third of its quality assurance department — after promising them pay hikes for weeks. Those who survived the purge walked off in protest, which quickly spiraled into a strike spanning several weeks. Upon returning, the workers announced they had formed a union, which Activision refused to recognize yesterday. Though momentarily thwarted, the testers’ struggle for fair treatment persists; they reportedly intend to file an election petition with the Board in the coming days.

In an interesting piece published yesterday, the New York Times observes that despite a series of thrilling triumphs — organizing victories at Starbucks and Amazon and successful strikes at John Deere and Kellogg — the labor movement continues to steadily unravel. The prominence of these high-profile efforts, the piece suggests, has obscured the sharp downward tick of private sector unionism, a trend it attributes primarily to “labor laws that are strongly tilted in favor of employers.”

Yet despite the erosion in private sector unionism, the piece strikes a positive note. It points out that the labor movement’s popularity has spiked in recent years and posits that “labor action has not seen the same steady decline” as union membership, highlighting the wave of “Red for Ed” education strikes and the surge of millions of nonunion workers leaving their jobs as the pandemic recedes.

In bargaining news, thousands of King Sooper’s employees in Colorado ratified the successor contract their union had tentatively accepted last week to conclude a ten-day strike, as I covered earlier this month. The contract grants employees what the union described as “the most significant wage increases ever secured by a UFCW local for grocery workers.”

And here at Harvard, the Crimson scooped that after months of negotiation, a couple hundred campus security guards, represented by SEIU 32BJ, have rejected a proposal from Securitas USA. One member of the bargaining committee skewered the proposal as “insulting” and another insisted the unit is “not asking for one million dollars,” only “fair treatment.” The collective bargaining agreement expired two weeks ago — while a strike appears increasingly likely, for now campus guards will continue to work without the protections of a union contract.