It never slows down with Activision Blizzard. Its annual shareholder meeting is in a month on June 21, and SOC Investment Group – an arm of the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions who try to get companies to vote against management – has issued an official filing to request the current board is not re-elected. This includes Bobby Kotick, as well as Brian Kelly, Robert Morgado, Robert Corti, Barry Meyer, and Peter Nolan. It joins last month’s news that the company has advised voting against a harassment report and company-chosen board representative.
The filing reads “each of these directors failed either to recognize that Activision Blizzard for years maintained unsafe workplaces exhibiting frequent and repeated sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender discrimination, or to appropriately address the Company’s ‘frat house’ culture once it was publicly revealed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in its pending lawsuit, which was filed in July 2021.”
The SOC Investment Group goes on to say the board’s response to the lawsuit was “at best superficial, failed to clarify open issues such as when prior to July 20 the Board became aware of the issues at the company, and introduced a new Board committee focused on workplace culture that has yet to take any publicly visible actions.” It then details the various allegations leveled at the company and the response, or lack thereof, from Kotick and others, as laid out in various articles and lawsuits.
It continues:
“Did the Board know that Kotick and other executives had for years overseen workplaces where systemic sexual harassment was taking place, and that Kotick had repeatedly acted to protect offenders, or did the Board only learn of the true situation in July 2021, along with shareholders? If the former is true, then the Activision Board is guilty of staggering incompetence. The huge loss of value shareholders have suffered over the past year, to say nothing of the suffering of Activision employees experiencing harassment and discrimination, could have been prevented or at least limited if the Board had acted on what it knew, as was surely its duty. Alternatively, if Kotick did not inform the Board of the number, range, and scope of harassment allegations against Activision executives and managers, then keeping such information from the Board is without question a fireable offense. While we cannot at this time discern which of these clear failures the Board is culpable for, there can be no doubt that they are culpable for one of them.”
There are also explanations of what high-ranking women at the company have been through. It singles out Jennifer O’Neal and Frances Townsend, two women promoted to executive-level roles, who almost immediately left them.
In another section, there are details of how Activision Blizzard’s board of directors compares to contemporaries. Negative statements are made on the length of tenure, composition, and specifics of the board’s additional activities, all of which SOCIG clearly believe are incorrect or, at best, ill-conceived.
Understandably, the filing focuses on shareholder confidence, and finally says that replacing these directors is just the first step in “restoring confidence in the Activision Blizzard board.” It finishes:
“We cannot be certain how long-lasting any changes to Activision’s Board may be, given the uncertainty surrounding the antitrust review of the Microsoft merger. But for the moment, shareholders are being asked to vote in director elections, and their votes should reflect the dismal performance of the Activision Board over the past several years, and especially its passive and deferential response to the sexual harassment crisis.”
It will be a few weeks before we see any major fallout from this, as the results of the various votes are announced. Microsoft has already committed to recognising the recently-formed union within the company they’re meant to be buying between now and next year. It’s not especially likely that a majority of shareholders will break from the board’s advice and go with the SOCIG, these sorts of filing are relatively common, but you never know.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
