Blizzard Employees Strike, English-Language Press Ignores

I am an American who happens to be playing World of Warcraft on servers in Spain as a way to learn Spanish. I was on the Spanish World of Warcraft page the other day, wow-esp.com, and I saw an announcement about a strike. According to the announcement, four employees of Blizzard Entertainment Europe, located in France, went on strike October 17th to protest working conditions and poor management. These employees represent most of the six person Spanish localization team, including English-Spanish translators and quality assurance... assurers. A fifth employee joined them later.

When I read about this strike, I was surprised I hadn't heard about it before. After all, it was more than a month old, and I read many gaming blogs and news sites that frequently mention WoW. So, I searched Google in English for the strike (using combinations of the words blizzard, Europe, strike, Warcraft, vivendi, and translators) and found nothing. Then I searched in Spanish for "blizzard huelga traductor warcraft," where huelga means strike and traductor means translator in Spanish, and found lots of results. Could it be that news of this strike never made it into English-language press? It's still hard for me to believe that that's possible, so if anyone finds a reference to the strike in English please post it in a comment here. Anecdotally, I found discussion of the strike on the IGDA's forums in Spanish, but not in English.

Here is my understanding of the strike so far. Only five employees struck (most of the Spanish translation team) from Blizzard Entertainment Europe, out of approximately 650 employees at that office. They say they struck because they were disrespected by management, were not given access to the tools they needed to do their job, were not adequately trained to use Blizzard's custom tools, and were not led by managers who had experience or familiarity with the intricacies of translation. In addition, they say one of the members of the team was inappropriately fired. They are demanding these issues be addressed, and that they be paid at the start of future projects. Blizzard, for its part, disagreed with the claims that the translators needed additional tools and has declined to discuss the strike publicly (see translations below). The strike continued for at least two weeks, into November. I'm not sure what has happened since then, and whether the strike continues. There have been updates on the strike posted to wow-esp.com, but nothing in the last month.

My Spanish skills are decent, but I would love help carefully translating all of the exchanges about the strike. Please contact me if you'd like to collaborate, or of course feel free to post translations at your own sites. Also, if anyone finds anything about the outcome of the strike, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it. I have e-mailed the local union in Velizy, France that is representing the strikers (CGT) to ask for updates, but have not yet received a response.

I wonder if striking means the same thing culturally in France and Spain as it does in The States. Here, a strike is a pretty big deal. However, I remember when I was living in Costa Rica that there were strikes all the time and people started to ignore them. I wonder if that is at all true in Europe. If so, that and the small scale of the strike could be reasons it was never picked up in the English-language press.

Blizzard comments, translated from Spanish:

43. Re: strike of the Spanish Blizzard employees | October 26, 2006, 17:30:09 UTC

Blizzard Entertainment considers the well-being of its employees as the most important thing and actively requests their opinions and suggestions. This is indicated by the permanence of our European office, which has 650 employees. However, four of our new employees of the European office have taken the decision of going on strike. We understand that, on occasion, the employees have differences with the responsibilities and we believe that, as part of a healthy workplace, it is better to resolve these situations directly with the persons implicated, instead of doing it publicly. As such, we prefer to not make any comment at this time."

Nazamur
Community Manager, Spanish
Blizzard Entertainment

54. Re: strike of the Spanish Blizzard employees | October 27, 2006, 7:45:45 UTC

Thank you everyone for your concern.

Simply to add clarification. The Spanish translators had used exactly the same tools as the German and French translators, and problems have never arisen before. As for the Spanish translation of The Burning Crusade, we are continuing forward without setbacks, as we have already communicated to you, only four people from the Spanish localization department have decided to go on strike, not the complete department.

Announcements from the strikers, in Spanish: (Word Docs)
24/10/2006 Blizzard_ES_Huelga_1.doc
26/10/2006 Blizzard_ES_Huelga_2.doc
31/10/2006 Blizzard_ES_Huelga_3.doc

Interestingly, the second and third documents were created by someone who registered their word processor to Guybrush Threepwood. He or she must have been a Monkey Island fan.