In organizing news, the collective bargaining aspirations of dozens of quality assurance testers at the Activision subsidiary that develops the popular Call of Duty video games hit a speedbump on Tuesday as the company declined their request for voluntary recognition. The company sparked the organizing effort last month when it unexpectedly fired nearly a third of the department. Those who survived the purge walked off in protest, which soon spiraled into a strike that lasted several weeks. Upon returning the workers announced they had formed a union, which Activision refused to recognize yesterday. The testers reportedly intend to file an election petition in the coming days.

In an interesting piece published yesterday, the New York Times observes that despite a recent string of exhilarating victories — successful organizing drives at Starbucks and Amazon and successful strikes at John Deere and Kellogg — the labor movement continues to steadily disintegrate. The prominence of these high profile efforts, the piece explains, risks obscuring the ongoing collapse of private sector unionization, which the NYT attributes largely to “labor laws that are strongly tilted in favor of employers.” Still, the article identifies grounds for optimism. It highlights that the labor movement’s salience and popularity have soared in recent years and that labor militancy has accelerated, pointing to the wave of “Red for Ed” strikes and the millions of nonunion workers who have left their jobs as the pandemic retreats.

In bargaining news, nearly ten thousand King Sooper’s employees in Colorado concluded a ten-day strike yesterday, ratifying the successor contract their union accepted last week. I covered the strike — the state’s largest in many years — earlier this month. The agreement provides what the union has described as “the most significant wage increases ever secured by a UFCW local for grocery workers.”