Former Activsion Exec Claims Publisher Discriminated Against 'Old White Guys' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 March 2024 / 2,917 Views
A former Activision Blizzard executive has filed a lawsuit against the publisher in California claiming the company of age discrimination and violating the state's whistleblower protection law, according to Law360 and spotted by GamesIndustry.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month who worked at Activision Blizzard from 2014 until being laid off in late August due to restructuring in the company's Central Tech department. He was one of six other men 47 or older laid off.
The former executive states Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard until the end of December, 2023, at a leadership conference said the "Problem" with the publisher is that "there are too many old white guys.
The lawsuit says a pair of white executives left the company shortly after the conference saying their departures were "based, at least in part, on Kotick's ageist remarks." When leaving company, one of the executives recommended the Plaintiff to replace them, however, the suit says he was passed over in favor of a younger non-white employees who then became his manager.
The new manager is accused of creating a hostile work environment and claims his merit-based base salary increase for the year was the lowest he received during his time at the company.
The lawsuit also alleges a woman in his department complained to human resources about her own merit-based increase being below expectations and claims she made also and defamatory remarks about him and his manager to human resources.
The former executive filed his own complaint to human resources, accusing Activision Blizzard of failing "to protect Plaintiff from the discriminatory and defamatory accusations."
"Plaintiff asked for 'checks and balances' and made clear that Plaintiff 'was the first person to sound an alarm that a larger issue might be brewing,'" reads the lawsuit.
The Plaintiff stated, "Activision placed profits over people by terminating the older, higher paid executives."
The lawsuit is asking for damages to make up the loss of earnings for the Plaintiff, the negative impact to career advancement, reputational damage, emotional distress and wrongful termination, as well as covering legal costs.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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The thing is, in many cases they are not even hiding this, but stating things like this publicly. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors. Racism seems to be ok if it's "the right kind".
Considering this sentence is totally acceptable 'there are too many old white guys' , I agree with you. If you would change the word white or the word guys in this sentence, the sentence would not be acceptable. On the other hand without discriminating against white people in executive positions, you would never get more diverse executives. Must suck though if you are a young white dude , who aspires such a position in a huge company, in that case emigration might not be a bad idea or trying to make another big company yourself (and become part of the inequality problem in the proces).
There are plenty of options to diversify your workforce inside a meritocracy framework without replacing certain demographics like older employees, what gets me is many studies have pointed out that older workers tend to be some of the most productive workers when compared to other cohorts , pointing out that life experience plays an important role in managing a successful workforce but unfortunately these findings need to be turned into active business policy that can be used to help overcome the usual ageist stereotypes .
In a lot of cases the point isn't to diversify the entire workforce though, only the top of the workforce pyramid. I agree that especially older employees are very important to have. They are productive and have more insight due to experience. Also older people usually have a better working ethic than young people.
Diversity for diversity's sake is not a good policy. On the surface, it may seem like a good thing for the world, but if you think about it even for a minute, you realize it is actually dumb and even unethical in its practical application. First of all, it is discriminatory by definition, because in order to help someone from a specific group ahead, it necessarily means discriminating against members of another group. Secondly, companies will no longer get the most competent people, and in some fields, it will affect not only their success, but even customer safety and such things. This kind of policy will also be a disservice to minorities, because they will always be under the suspicion that they are diversity hires, that they don't really deserve to be there because they are not actually the best person to handle the job. Even if they actually had been the best applicant, who could ever know, because the hiring policies are like this?
I get of course what this is trying to fix, because there are people who have prejudices and will not treat minority applicants equally when hiring. Those people are shooting themselves in the foot, because they will over time lose out on competent people if they won't consider all kinds of people. However, DEI is not the right way to remedy anything.
Well, I don't think being white is the major problem here, but old people are actually discriminated against, especially in the tech sector.
Where I work, corporate sent in a new boss (because the interim guy who had been doing the job well for months didn't have a college degree). One of the first things the new boss said was that "there are too many older people working here."
This shouldn't be acceptable but it is because the people who pretend to care about bias in the workplace only show interest when doing so will mesh with their own preconceptions or help them feed their own egos by helping someone they perceive as being 'lower' than them.
The irony in this particular instance was that his plan to cut back the hours of the older workers failed completely because most of the new workers he hired kept calling out or quit without notice, meaning the existing employees had to work more overtime.
this is fucking stupid. you really wanna put your faith in activision blizzard executives? famously awful to work for ABK and you wanna trust the fuckers running the show?
Just money grubbing...
Would you say the same for other demographics?
