Ubisoft Employees Petition Public For Support, Company Offers Pay Raises

While the entire gaming industry has been focused on Activision Blizzard and the scandal surrounding the company, Ubisoft’s own problems with sexual harassment, discrimination, and mismanagement have seemingly taken a back seat. Current and former employees, however, are stepping up their fight for better working conditions with a petition asking the public for support to help force management to comply with their demands.

“100 days ago we signed our open letter and set out our four key demands. None of our demands have been met. So today we’re launching a new petition, open for ALL our supporters to sign,” tweeted employee group A Better Ubisoft.

The group is criticizing Ubisoft for all but ignoring their demands with no “strategy roadmap of change for HR,” timeline of delivery, or even a “hint of what those changes will be.” This is 16 months after allegations of workplace misconduct were made public.

“You offer nothing more than your assurance that all investigations are impartial, all sanctions are appropriate and that victims and witnesses are protected, while offering us no evidence, involvement or oversight in any part of the process,” read the group’s statement last week.

On the subject of sanctions, one of the group’s demands is for the company to stop promoting known offenders and moving them from team to team, studio to studio with no repercussions. They’re also asking for a “meaningful say” on how the company, as a whole, moves forward from here and for union representatives and non-management employees to have more influence in creating and implementing processes for dealing with offenders.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft has raised the salaries of their employees by 5%-7% for rank and file employees and as much as 20% for managers. According to the company, the pay raises are due to market changes in Canada but it was probably done to help stem the ongoing exodus of talent from the company.

“They’re desperately trying to hold on to what few experienced devs are still here,” a current Ubsioft developer told Kotaku.

“These moves do absolutely nothing to address the key demands of A Better Ubisoft,” the employee group added. “In addition, by weighting the pay rises enormously in favor of senior staff, management are exacerbating the gap between the highly and low paid workers.”