More than 700 Activision Blizzard workers sign petition to drop CEO Bobby Kotick

After walking out of work on Tuesday, Activision Blizzard workers are rallying together to call for CEO Bobby Kotick’s resignation. Over 700 workers from both production and development have already signed the petition. As the petition is circulated, it continues to increase in signees.

“We, the undersigned, no longer have confidence in the leadership of Bobby Kotick as the CEO of Activision Blizzard,” the employees said Thursday.

Continue the petition:

The information that has come to light about his behaviors and practices in the running of our companies runs counter to the culture and integrity we require of our leadership—and directly conflicts with the initiatives started by our peers. Bobby Kotick be asked to resign as Activision Blizzard CEO. The shareholders should have the power to elect the new CEO. Bobby has a large share of voting rights.

The push for Kotick’s removal comes after a new report from the Wall Street Journal uncovered the wide extent of Kotick’s knowledge regarding employee misconduct and sexual harassment, as well as the news of pay inequity between Blizzard co-leaders Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra. Before her resignation, Oneal — Blizzard’s first female co-leader — was not offered the same salary as Ybarra, until she told the company she was quitting.

Alongside these workers, a group of Activision Blizzard shareholders have also called for Kotick — and two longtime board members — to resign. These shareholders, which represent 4.8 million owned shares of Activision Blizzard’s total 778.9 million shares, requested that Kotick and board members Brian Kelly and Robert Morgado retire by Dec. 31. Activision Blizzard’s Board of Directors, however, continue to stand by the CEO. In a statement published Tuesday, a Board representative said the group “remains confident in Bobby Kotick’s leadership.”

Following a California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit, multiple sources have expressed doubts in the current Activision Blizzard leadership and Board members. (Multiple investigations and lawsuits are ongoing. A single investigation was settled.

According to Activision Blizzard, there are nearly 10,000 employees. Activision Blizzard workers are not new to making demands of their bosses. After the lawsuit, thousands of workers from both current and past signed an open letter addressed to executives. Frustrated by the initial “tone deaf” response to the allegations, in which executives called the allegations “distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past,” workers called for their demands to be met. Kotick addressed some demands in October, introducing a “new zero-tolerance harassment policy” and waiving the forced arbitration process the company uses to handle sexual harassment and discrimination complaints. Kotick also said at that time that he’d take a major pay cut, downsizing his $875,000 annual salary to $62,500; it had already been reduced from $1.5 million earlier in the year. The Journal reported that Activision Blizzard announced these new measures only after its journalists approached the company with questions related to Tuesday’s report.

Activision Blizzard workers told Polygon that the company’s denial of the Journal’s report harkens back to the initial response — once again implying that any allegations are “distorted and untrue.”

“We need to trust in our leadership,” Blizzard software engineer Valentine Powell told Polygon at Tuesday’s walkout. “To an extent we have trust in our direct leadership — the people that we work with every day who are trying to solve the problems. They lose trust in us every time Activision Blizzard comes up. They deny every claim. They keep telling us that we’re wrong. […]When it all comes down to it, however, it is necessary for a systemic shift. We need the ability to have transparency in what’s happening.”

[Disclosure: Casey Wasserman is on the board of directors for Activision Blizzard as well as the board of directors of Vox Media, Polygon’s parent company.]