filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 11, three days before the June 14 meeting. After Activision Blizzard’s workplace problems came to public light, the SOC stepped up its pressure campaign. It has urged the company to add women and employees to its board, claw back bonuses from abusive executives, stall all executive bonuses in 2021, and submit to a company-wide equity review.
The SOC effort has generated a fair bit of media coverage—including this post, to be meta about it—and generally been a thorn in Activision Blizzard’s side, though it has so far failed to achieve its objectives.
Our focus was initially on excessive executive pay, on unreasonably rewarding executives for levels of performance that we didn’t think warranted the kind of repeat awards that were given out, or awards of that size. But that said, we’d always been cognizant of the fact that there were real issues in the workplaces of the video gaming industry. We’ve heard for many years about sexual harassment, racial harassment.
It’s pretty commonplace—to some extent in journalism, academic finance literature, and economics—to talk about investors or shareholders as if they were all sort of necessarily of one mind about things or that they always agree or that they should be expected to agree or that we could clearly and easily represent their interests in a sort of univocal way. It’s just generally not true at all.
You mentioned venture capital. The venture capital industry, while it does draw a lot of money from rich people, it also draws a lot of money from public employee pension funds, and those are overwhelmingly representing unionized workers. So I think that the venture capital industry is in this somewhat peculiar position where, just as you say, a lot of the people involved are not necessarily thrilled if they find out that workers at a company they’re investing in are looking to organize.