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Coverage | Newsletter | Intel | Events
Coverage | Newsletter | Intel
April 8, 2021
In March, Douyin users in three Chinese cities discovered that the popular short-video app had quietly launched a new Groupon-like feature, a "group buying" feed that allowed users to order takeout, book hotels and reserve tickets and services. It's part of a pattern: Over the past few years, Douyin has beefed up its social network by adding features from livestreaming to ecommerce, from gaming to instant messaging, challenging existing dominant players in each vertical. Now Douyin has expanded into the so-called "local life services," taking on Meituan, a dominant player in this space, which offers a wide range of services meeting users' offline life needs, from food delivery to ticket booking.
It's clear that the young Douyin is not content to be just an entertainment app, however lucrative that may be. Instead, it's one of several Chinese apps engaged in a quiet, high-stakes battle to become the next WeChat, a mega app that now has 1.1 billion monthly active users, 80% of China's total population. In the past decade, WeChat has transformed human interaction in China and grown into an ecosystem for innovation, making it virtually the sole super-app most of China can't live without. The question now is whether anyone can dethrone it.
By nature, Chinese tech companies do not feel encumbered by their "core competencies." And Chinese web users are accustomed to mega apps that do a lot of different things. Tech analysts can't agree on who will take over the throne from WeChat, but they anticipate that WeChat's status as the super app won't survive Beijing's ongoing antitrust drive. This means China may end up with more than one mega app, each favored by different demographics.
Douyin is hardly the only app that's expanding beyond its core business. Meituan is said to be testing a group chat feature. Douyin nemesis Kuaishou is already turning into a communication channel and building a "local life" business center. And a slew of tech companies are adding a mobile wallet feature.
"An app ecosystem that is more diverse is healthy for everyone. Competition creates more innovation and generally more competitive rates and conditions for everyone involved except the tech giants," said Mark Tanner, managing director of Shanghai-based China Skinny, a marketing and research agency. "It will also further build the cottage industries that come from supporting these apps."
Why does every Chinese app want to be WeChat?
It's unsurprising that each popular Chinese mobile app is building a larger footprint, be it a short-video platform, a delivery service or an online marketplace. China's online population growth has slowed after a decade of mobile internet expansion. China now has nearly 1 billion internet users, representing about 70% of the country's total population. Almost every Chinese netizen already uses mobile apps designed by Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, according to market research firm QuestMobile. In other words, there aren't a whole lot of web users who remain untapped. Afraid of missing the next must-win market, Chinese tech giants tend to add ever more functions to get existing users hooked.
"Failures don't sway them from trying new things, even in ventures that may not make sense to third-party observers," Man-Chung Cheung, a research analyst at eMarketer, a New York-based market research company, told Protocol.
Who will win?
Analysts are generally divided on who's most likely to take the throne from WeChat, or at least share the throne. But some say Douyin is the top contender.
Douyin's not even five years old, but it has already been feuding with WeChat for about three. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and Tencent founder Pony Ma were caught bickering publicly on WeChat in 2018; Zhang accused WeChat of blocking and plagiarizing Douyin, which ByteDance owns, and Ma countered that Zhang's accusation was libel. Last year, WeChat launched its own short-video feature, a deliberate challenge to Douyin and Kuaishou. In early February, Douyin brought a lawsuit against Tencent, accusing WeChat of blocking Douyin content.
Meanwhile, netizens are increasingly shifting their attention away from WeChat and toward Douyin, a completely different ecosystem. Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok have routinely topped the global chart of the most downloaded non-game app in Apple's App Store since 2018. Douyin has amassed 550 million monthly active users. Though Tencent's apps, WeChat included, still captured most user attention in 2020, compared with 2019, Chinese smartphone users were spending more time on ByteDance's apps, including Douyin, and spending less time than they previously had on Tencent products, according to QuestMobile.
Douyin is particularly popular among China's youth. Last year, netizens under 30 spent an average of 33 hours on Douyin each month, longer than any other video app. "Douyin is great for discovery and entertainment, while WeChat seems to be where one forms deeper connections and conversations," Cheung said. "I think they are still quite different and there is room for both."
ByteDance is already China's most valuable private company, valued at $180 billion and poised to go public this year. By building an infrastructure for what Douyin calls "interest-based ecommerce" (兴趣电商) and "local life" services, ByteDance expects to see rising revenues and longer usage time. Douyin only dipped into ecommerce in 2019, but has already raked in $76 billion in GMV in 2020, more than tripling its 2019 total, according to the Chinese financial publication LatePost. In January, Douyin's e-wallet pay feature went live. As CCTV's Spring Festival Gala's exclusive virtual red-packet partner (WeChat pioneered this user-acquisition play in 2014 to great success), Douyin doled out a record high $186 million worth of red envelopes during the mid-February holiday, all to attract new users — 70.3 billion interactions, to be exact. In 2020, ad revenue accounted for about 73% of ByteDance's total revenue, and 60% of that was from Douyin. "Local life," on the cusp of becoming a $100 billion market in China, serves as just another opportunity for Douyin to serve ads on behalf of small and medium businesses. Analysts say "local life" services have great growth potential because of their frequent usage.
"[Douyin has] increasingly [wrested] screen time away from WeChat through their AI-driven, intuitive and entertaining user experience, which I expect they will apply to their gaming, ecommerce, payments and other investments to keep users hooked," Tanner said. Although WeChat's No. 1 position in communication is tough to challenge, "based on [Douyin's] current trajectory and additional services, they are on track to surpass WeChat for share of screen time, which in a way makes them the 'next WeChat,'" Tanner said.
But other analysts are not quite convinced that Douyin will replace WeChat as the national app, at least not yet. Douyin's is nowhere near as powerful a communication tool as WeChat, nor Kuaishou. "If anything, the user behavior on Kuaishou initially was very WeChat-like, and even now it encourages much more communication between users than Douyin," tech analyst Rui Ma told Protocol. In terms of social and 'life" services, Ant Financial's Alipay is far more comprehensive than Douyin.
Douyin's ecosystem is too new, and it will take time for users to see it as something more than a time-killer, said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of Alarice, a Chinese social media marketing agency. "I think there will be always WeChat, and there will be a few other players," Dudarenok said, adding that Douyin, its nemesis Kuaishou, Alipay and Meituan are strong contenders to potentially become a super app in a specific segment or for a specific demographic. "I don't think anybody is replacing WeChat."
Shen Lu
Shen Lu is a reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
Protocol | Workplace
The pay gap persists for Black women
"The pay gap is a multifaceted problem and any time you have a complex problem, there's not a single solution that's going to solve it."
For every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, Black women are paid just 63 cents, according to the American Community Survey Census data.
Photo: Christine/Unsplash
August 3, 2021
Amber Burton (@amberbburton) is a reporter at Protocol. Previously, she covered personal finance and diversity in business at The Wall Street Journal. She earned an M.S. in Strategic Communications from Columbia University and B.A. in English and Journalism from Wake Forest University. She lives in North Carolina.
August 3, 2021
Last year's racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd led many tech companies to commit to promoting equity within their organizations, including working toward pay equity. But despite efforts, the wage gap for Black women still persists. For every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, Black women are paid just 63 cents, according to the American Community Survey Census data.
Black Women's Equal Pay Day on Tuesday represents the estimated number of days into the year it would take for Black women to make what their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts made at the end of the previous year, according to the organization Equal Pay Today. And while the responsibility to fix the pay gap falls mostly on companies to rectify, some female employees have taken matters into their own hands and held companies to their asserted values by negotiating higher pay.
People analytics firm Visier found for Black employees as a whole it will take 78 years to reach what their white colleagues are making. And in 2020 there was a regression of earlier progress made for Black workers between 2017 and 2019, a recent change that is thought to be due to the pandemic.
Though in the past few months, the labor shortage and the "Great Resignation" has added some bargaining power for tech workers. In June 2021, the number of unemployed people who quit or voluntarily left their job to seek new employment increased by 164,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The competition for talent among tech companies has pushed salaries up despite the pandemic. The average U.S. tech salary rose 3.6% from 2019 to 2020, according to Dice, although the report did not include a breakdown of salaries according to race or gender.
Ariel Lopez, a career coach who works with women in technology, said that she is encouraging her Black female clients to recognize their power during this time.
"I think right now we're seeing a shift to where people are taking their power back and they're making their demands not only of where they want to be working, the type of place they want to be working and how they want to be treated."
Lopez has guided Black women over the past year in how to ask for more money without the face-to-face conversation in the office, but said she recognizes a lot of the responsibility lies with the companies to promote and retain Black women.
"I do believe the crux of the issue and what we're looking at has everything to do with companies and their lack of fair, efficient and inclusive processes as it pertains to hiring, and also as it pertains to retention," Lopez told Protocol.
She said technology companies can work to fix this by introducing more transparency into job descriptions and onboarding.
"People should know what they're getting themselves into so the moment someone signs an offer letter they are clear on what this looks like. I think if we're talking about tech specifically explaining to people what their stock options are," she said.
Lopez has found that many new employees are not made aware of what a vesting schedule is and how long a person would have to be at the company to reap the benefits. Omitting information such as this could cause a big disadvantage for women of color in terms of pay.
Jacqueline Twillie, a career coach with a focus on negotiation, has also spent time coaching Black women in tech during this time. Twillie, the founder of ZeroGap, a leadership development company that coaches women working in male-dominated industries, believes the solution to closing the gap should be varied.
"The pay gap is a multifaceted problem and any time you have a complex problem, there's not a single solution that's going to solve it," Twillie told Protocol. "So part of the work is going to be done inside of companies with their compensation teams, and part of that is making sure women have access to childcare, and family care. We know the burden, especially in 2020, that women took in taking care of their families."
Twillie said she likes to remind her clients that the one thing they can control is negotiating when they receive an offer, since even in the current job market the first offer is rarely the best offer.
Others also suggest being clear about what you want and expressing exactly what you need to do your best work, whether that's more compensation or a new location. Minda Harts, a career coach and author of "The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table," told Protocol that she encourages her clients to leverage their relationships at work and be honest about their specific needs.
"Because before we move on and look for another job, can it work where we are? We won't know that unless we let people know and we're clear and transparent," she said.
Jacquette M. Timmons, a financial behaviorist, told Protocol that with more tech employees working remotely, Black women are having to be even more intentional in reaching their compensation goals. She suggests networking in all directions by sending a short email to a colleague after a video meeting since in-office chats around the watercooler have become rare.
"I think that this is really an invitation to be that much more purposeful and intentional about who you are reaching out to, why you're reaching out to them, what projects you're raising your hand for. And then also, I think an important piece is making sure that you're tracking your work and you're tracking the reaction to the work," she said.
Timmons said true improvement in closing the wage gap for Black women will only occur if CEOs and other C-suite executives make the issue one of their values.
"If they do not do that, then no, there's no amount of hope that's going to change it," she said.
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Amber Burton (@amberbburton) is a reporter at Protocol. Previously, she covered personal finance and diversity in business at The Wall Street Journal. She earned an M.S. in Strategic Communications from Columbia University and B.A. in English and Journalism from Wake Forest University. She lives in North Carolina.
Sponsored Content
The future of AI: Deeper insights, personalization and problem-solving stand to transform how we use AI across devices and industries
August 2, 2021
Alex Katouzian currently serves as senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile, Compute and Infrastructure (MCI) Business Unit at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. In this role, Katouzian is responsible for the profit, loss and strategy of the MCI BU, which includes business lines for Mobile Handset Products and Application Processor Technologies, 4G and 5G Mobile Broadband for embedded applications, Small and Macro Cells, Modem Technologies, Compute products across multiple OS’, eXtended Reality and AI Edge Cloud products.
July 26, 2021
What comes to mind when you think of AI? In the past, it might have been the Turing test, a sci-fi character or IBM's Deep Blue-defeating chess champion Garry Kasparov. Today, instead of copying human intelligence, we're seeing immense progress made in using AI to unobtrusively simplify and enrich our own intelligence and experiences. Natural language processing, modern encrypted security solutions, advanced perception and imaging capabilities, next-generation data management and logistics, and automotive assistance are some of the many ways AI is quietly yet unmistakably driving some of the latest advancements inside our phones, PCs, cars and other crucial 21st century devices. And the combination of 5G and AI is enabling a world with distributed intelligence where AI processing is happening on devices and in the cloud.
We've invested in AI for over a decade, and continue to do so today, having recently brought on- board the top-notch AI research team from Twenty Billion Neurons GmbH (TwentyBN), including their high-quality video dataset that is widely used by the AI research community. We are excited to have TwentyBN founding CEO Roland Memisevic, who co-led the world-renowned AI institute MILA with Yoshua Bengio, and team expand our AI R&D base in Toronto, which is long recognized as a hotbed for innovation and research in the field of AI. Furthermore, AI is now a core component of our mobile platforms. And breakthroughs like our 6th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine are helping change the game — literally. It's designed to boost performance in everything from connectivity and photography to gaming. By integrating directly with the phone's camera, modem, and other components of our mobile platform design, AI supports faster, more efficient processing. The Qualcomm AI Engine enables powerful image and language processing capabilities for clearer pictures and video via ArcSoft's neural network, as well as real-time translations and voice assistance.
Our successes in mobile — together with our ecosystem collaborators — allowed us to move AI beyond the smartphone into other industries segments like PCs, XR, factories, and auto. AI is not only making things more intelligent, it's helping simplify and enrich our daily lives. Take PCs, for example. Sophos security solutions optimized for our mobile compute platforms enable lightning- fast threat detection. And AI is redefining the video call experience for PC users, delivering smoother performance and quality. AI is impacting the ongoing growth in XR as well. All perception technologies in XR use AI, so wearers of smart devices can better see, understand, and interact with the digital world. Next-generation warehouse management, logistics, and asset tracking showcase the power of computer vision and machine learning capabilities to increase speed and efficiency. And for cars, AI-enhanced digital cockpits with voice assistance, immersive audio, and rich visuals provide precise interactions between vehicle and driver along with contextual safety awareness.
In this latest video from our ongoing "The Future of" series moderated by Karl Freund from Cambrian AI, I sat down with Qualcomm Technologies' Vice President of Product Management Ziad Asghar and Co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face Clément Delangue. We discussed how AI will continue reimagining lives and industries. We also spoke about what AI means to different consumers, and how their demands fit into how we continue to shape on-device AI in our respective fields. AI and machine learning are growing exponentially within data centers, cloud computing networks, and many other devices beyond phones and PCs, and we dive into how companies are strategizing around evolving AI capabilities as the technology becomes a larger part of their businesses.
The perception of AI has radically changed, and its applications will continue to impact the world and our experiences in ways we've never imagined. That's why Qualcomm Technologies invests so much in building AI into the backbone of our mobile platforms, and why we'll continue to be a leader in applications involving deeper AI-driven insights, personalization, and problem-solving.
Learn more about how AI is transforming everything.
Discover the power of on-device AI with the Qualcomm AI Engine.
Read about the Future of the PC and how 5G connectivity will transform laptop computing.
Qualcomm AI Engine is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
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Alex Katouzian currently serves as senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile, Compute and Infrastructure (MCI) Business Unit at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. In this role, Katouzian is responsible for the profit, loss and strategy of the MCI BU, which includes business lines for Mobile Handset Products and Application Processor Technologies, 4G and 5G Mobile Broadband for embedded applications, Small and Macro Cells, Modem Technologies, Compute products across multiple OS’, eXtended Reality and AI Edge Cloud products.
Protocol | Workplace
Tech company hybrid work policies are becoming more flexible, not less
Twitter, LinkedIn and Asana are already changing their hybrid policies to allow for more flexibility.
Photo: FG Trade/Getty Images
August 3, 2021
Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley.
August 3, 2021
Twitter, LinkedIn and Asana are all loosening up their strategies around hybrid work, allowing for more flexibility before even fully reopening their offices.
In the last week and a half, Twitter announced it's adopting an asynchronous-first approach, and both Asana and LinkedIn said they would increase the amount of time their employees can work remotely.
The three changes point to one thing: With 17 months of remote work in the rearview mirror — and the delta variant now postponing office reopenings — work styles in the tech industry are getting more flexible, not less.
Twitter tells employees to be less Zoom-happy
"Any company that goes backwards will be backwards," Twitter's chief human resources officer, Jennifer Christie, told Protocol on Thursday. "Companies that have tried to drive this top-down and say 'This is how you'll work' are finding a lot of resistance from employees."
Twitter has been looking into asynchronous work since late 2018, meeting with leaders at remote-only companies like GitLab to better understand async. The social media giant has also been planning to become a more remote-friendly company for several years now, Christie said.
Almost three years and a pandemic later, Twitter leaders now encourage employees to replace some meetings with other collaboration tools, such as Slack and document sharing.
"There's a higher bar for having a meeting," Christie said. "We still will have meetings. People won't be in meetings 12 hours a day, back to back."
The new approach better accommodates remote workers who live in different time zones, Christie said, noting that she doesn't expect the company to adopt async-first overnight. It's worth noting that unlike async companies like GitLab and Doist, Twitter's executives still plan to reopen the company's offices rather than go fully remote.
Perhaps for that reason, Christie said Twitter won't be a fully asynchronous company, either.
"It doesn't mean everything has to be async," Christie said. "It just means that instead of everything having to be live, everything having to be a meeting — which doesn't work as well for distributed teams all the time — we want people to think async."
LinkedIn lifts its 50% policy
Meanwhile, both LinkedIn and Asana announced last week that they would increase the amount of time their employees can work remotely after reopening their offices.
LinkedIn will remove the expectation that employees work from the office at least half the time after its offices reopen, CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote in a blog post.
"We trust each other to do our best work where it works best for us and our teams," Roslansky wrote. "We've learned every individual and every team works differently, so we're moving away from a one-size-fits-all policy."
Roslansky expects more LinkedIn employees to be remote than before the pandemic, but noted that 87% of the company's workforce still wants to go to the office sometimes.
Notably, neither Twitter nor LinkedIn has set a date at which it expects to reopen its offices. Last week, Twitter closed the offices that had reopened. Christie attributed that decision to there being "too much conflicting or unknown information out there that we just don't feel comfortable having our people come in."
LinkedIn has done away with its plans to fully reopen next month, but has opened some offices, including in New York and San Francisco, spokesperson Alaia Howell said.
Asana backs off of Wednesdays-only approach
Asana, meanwhile, has postponed its reopening until February or later and is reversing an earlier plan to only let its employees work remotely on Wednesdays.
The company will now allow for remote work on both Wednesdays and Fridays, which provides more flexibility for employees who otherwise would have faced an unusually office-centric model.
Asana had touted the earlier Wednesdays-only approach as one that would maximize the benefits of in-person collaboration, which is interesting given that the nearly $12 billion company sells project management software that allows teams to collaborate from anywhere.
Part of the reason for Asana's emphasis on the office is how quickly Asana has been growing, according to the company's head of people, Anna Binder. Between March 2020 and July 2021, the company hired more than 500 employees for a total of more than 1,000.
Evidently, much more growth is in store: The company has a new 12-story headquarters in San Francisco.
"We really believe from a culture perspective that collaboration and trust are spurred and reinforced by the daily shared experiences, those face-to-face communications," Binder said. "The drive-bys, the minutes before and after an official meeting starts, the open space where there's whiteboards everywhere and that people get to just drop in and do jam sessions."
Pros and cons to the in-office approach
Both Binder and Asana's head of diversity and inclusion, Sonja Gittens Ottley, acknowledged that the in-office approach had limitations when it came to hiring more candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, including women and people of color.
Some have touted flexible work as a possible route to diversify the tech workforce, given that it allows for more remote hiring outside of expensive tech hubs and provides more options to those who have caregiving responsibilities or simply don't want to work in the office.
Asana's leaders say they're more focused on building an office culture that promotes retention through inclusivity.
"It probably does impact recruiting," Gittens Ottley said last month. "The thing that I'm interested in, though, is: After you've done that recruiting and you get people in, how are you ensuring that they're staying? How are you ensuring that those folks are thriving?"
Binder said that employees' individual productivity "wasn't part of the discussion" when it came to crafting Asana's original four-day-a-week approach to office work; Asana is thinking more about collaboration and innovation across teams.
"When I think about productivity, I think about something that can be easily measured, like 'How many tickets did I close?' or 'How many phone calls did I take?'" Binder said. "That's not what we're talking about here. These are knowledge workers that are innovating and co-creating on a daily basis."
Another Silicon Valley company, Pure Storage, is also fond of its in-office culture. The company will allow its employees to work remotely part-time, but won't support remote workers after it fully reopens its offices, CEO Charlie Giancarlo told Protocol last month.
Although Pure Storage employees have told the company that they feel more productive working from home, managers report that team productivity is down, Giancarlo said. He sees this as an indicator that remote work makes it hard to innovate together.
"It's a team sport," Giancarlo said. "We don't operate in a sport where one engineer operating on their own can create brilliant things. It really requires collaboration."
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Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley.
Power
Activision Blizzard scrambles to repair its toxic image
Blizzard President J. Allen Brack is the first executive to depart amid the sexual harassment crisis.
Activision Blizzard doesn't seem committed to lasting change.
Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Getty Images
August 3, 2021
Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
August 3, 2021
As Activision Blizzard's workplace crisis rages on into its third week, the company is taking measures to try to calm the storm — to little avail. On Tuesday, Blizzard President J. Allen Brack, who took the reins at the developer responsible for World of Warcraft back in 2018, resigned. He's to be replaced by executives Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra, who will co-lead the studio in a power-sharing agreement some believe further solidifies CEO Bobby Kotick's control over the subsidiary.
Nowhere in Blizzard's statement about Brack's departure does it mention California's explosive sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit at the heart of the saga. The lawsuit, filed last month, resulted last week in a 500-person walkout at Blizzard's headquarters in Irvine. (Among the attendees was none other than Ybarra, the new studio co-head.)
Activision Blizzard so far appears uncommitted to lasting change. The company has made numerous empty gestures aimed at placating employee concerns and salvaging a falling stock price. Many of them seem self-serving.
- Company management offered employees paid time off to participate in the walkout, giving it an air of corporate sponsorship that walkout organizers were specifically trying to avoid. Meanwhile, the company has hired a law firm known for its union-busting efforts.
- Controversies surrounding Fran Townsend, the company's executive vice president for corporate affairs, continue to pile up. In the wake of the lawsuit, Townsend sent an email to employees dismissing the allegations as "meritless" and "untrue." The executive then tweeted an Atlantic story criticizing whistleblowers and began blocking Activision Blizzard employees for sounding off in her replies.
- Kotick sent a letter to employees last week in which he called the company's initial defensive response to the lawsuit "tone deaf," yet only after the company's stock price began tumbling. Activision Blizzard shares are down more than 15% since early July.
Stories of misconduct continue to pour out. The initial wave of revelations following news of the lawsuit involved shocking stories, including the so-called "Cosby suite" of disgraced former Blizzard creative director Alex Afrasiabi. Now, as more in the industry continue to speak out, we're starting to see the fuller picture of toxic rot at the heart of Activision Blizzard's culture.
- An Activision IT worker admitted in 2018 to installing spy cameras in the women's bathroom in the company's Minnesota office. The employee, Tony Ray Nixon, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor privacy violation.
- Security engineer Emily Mitchell said at Black Hat 2015 that she was mocked and harassed by Blizzard employees at the company's own booth, in which she was asked whether she "liked to be penetrated," according to Waypoint. Black Hat has since banned Blizzard from sponsoring the conference.
- A shocking IGN report detailed how male Blizzard employees would often walk into the office's breastfeeding rooms without knocking and refuse to leave until asked. The company later put locks on the doors.
Despite sorrowful apologies from former company leaders, current management at Activision Blizzard has been tight-lipped. When execs have spoken out, they've often been combative and dismissive. The company has yet to acknowledge any of the demands made by organizers of last week's walkout, including an end to the forced arbitration agreements that have helped guard many of the company's worst workplace abuses.
Later on Tuesday, Activision Blizzard will hold an earnings call with investors, where all eyes will be on Kotick and how he chooses to respond. Perhaps the company is hoping this will all blow over in time to announce this year's annual Call of Duty game later this summer. But that's wishful thinking. There's no indication the storm is subsiding, and employees who attended last week's walkout say that "This is the beginning of an enduring movement." That doesn't end with just one executive falling on the sword.
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Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
Protocol | Workplace
Alabama Amazon workers will likely get a second union vote
An NLRB judge said that Amazon "usurped" the NLRB by pushing for a mailbox to be installed in front of its facility, and also that the company violated laws that protect workers from monitoring of their behavior during union elections.
An NLRB judge ruled that Amazon has violated union election rules
Image: Amazon
August 3, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
August 3, 2021
Bessemer, Alabama warehouse workers will likely get a second union vote because of Amazon's efforts to have a USPS ballot box installed just outside of the Bessemer warehouse facility during the mail-in vote, as well as other violations of union vote rules, according to an NLRB ruling published Tuesday morning.
While union organizers, represented by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, lost the first vote by more than a 2:1 margin, a second election will be scheduled and held unless Amazon successfully appeals the ruling. Though Amazon is the country's second-largest private employer, no unionization effort at the company has ever been successful.
NLRB hearing officer Kerstin Meyers sustained seven of the RWDSU's objections to Amazon's conduct during the months-long mail-in union election in early 2021, and said that those seven objections were severe enough to merit a second election.
In one objection filed by the RWDSU, the hearing officer ruled that the company's distribution of materials like "vote no" tags at small meetings and in the presence of managers could reasonably make a worker feel like Amazon was trying to determine whether they supported the union effort. Nearly all of the members of the union bargaining unit were subject to this misconduct because the meetings were mandatory and conducted an untold number of times, according to Meyers.
The other six objections sustained by Meyers all related to Amazon's efforts to have a USPS mailbox installed at the entrance to the facility. "The Employer's conduct in causing this generic mail receptacle to be installed usurped the National Labor Relations Board's (Board or NLRB) exclusive role in administering Union elections. Notwithstanding the Union's substantial margin of defeat, the Employer's unilateral decision to create, for all intents and purposes, an onsite collection box for NLRB ballots destroyed the laboratory conditions and justifies a second election," Meyers wrote in her ruling.
Amazon plans to appeal the ruling. "Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company," an Amazon spokesperson told Protocol via email. "Their voice should be heard above all else, and we plan to appeal to ensure that happens."
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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