The ongoing legal challenge against Activision Blizzard’s closure of their EU office has reached an important milestone today, as French courts ruled to invalidate the redundancies applied when the Versailles office was closed. While this won’t give anyone their job back – the office is long gone and any positions it left open filled – it entitled them to massive payments equivalent to a minimum of six months salary. As always, there’s a bit of a catch.
As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, those who want their money will need to further pursue it at labor court. That’s a time-consuming and no-doubt expensive process. This is thanks to a law voted on in 2013 which lawyer for the case Mehdi Bouzaida called “hypocrisy” in an interview with French website Gamekult. It basically means that companies are free to continue on with the consequences of making people redundant – i.e., making it so their company doesn’t need them any more – while those redundancies are being contested. That’s exactly what happened here.
