"This is a monumental moment": Weeks after Microsoft laid off 9,000, Call of Duty devs vote to ratify union contract guaranteeing raises as the publisher pushes AI

19 quality assurance testers at Call of Duty developer Raven Software have ratified a union contract with parent company Microsoft, barely a month after the publisher laid off 9,000 workers, including thousands at Xbox, in a serious bet on AI technology.

Inverse editor Shannon Liao reports in an interview on her Substack that the QA testers' contract will guarantee 10% raises over two years, require seven days' notice for mandatory overtime in an effort to ameliorate crunch, and will allow work from home. The contract – the fruit of three years' worth of negotiation – will also more sharply define testers' job descriptions and their possible promotions.

"How do you progress within QA? How do you get promoted?" tester Autumn Prazuch says. "For so long, we haven't had those [answers], to be able to curate them with the company and come to an agreement… that, I think, is our crowning achievement."

QA tester Erin Hall agrees, commenting that "it feels like we've been sprinting a marathon, and so to finally be at the end of it is kind of unbelievable."

Raven's union win comes at a time when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is congratulating the company on its power grab for more AI – a decision that supposedly instigated those 9,000 job cuts in July. In a recent memo addressed to employees, Nadella said, "We must reimagine our mission for a new era. What does empowerment look like in the era of AI?"

To the Raven Software QA testers, the answer might seem simple: stand together against it.

"If our unit of 19 people can do this, anybody can," says Hall.

"You're the first interview I've ever given the permission to use my name," Prazuch observes to Liao, "so this is a monumental moment."

Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people, and its CEO physically cannot stop talking about AI: "Cloud and AI is the driving force of business transformation across every industry and sector."