Microsoft President Brad Smith said yesterday that the software giant will respect the efforts from its employees who want to unionize. The announcement comes right after a group of employees at Activision Blizzard, a major video game publisher which is being acquired by Microsoft voted to form a union.
In his blog post on the matter, Smith said that Microsoft wants to have a forward-thinking approach regarding unionization efforts. “Recent unionization campaigns across the country — including in the tech sector — have led us to conclude that inevitably these issues will touch on more businesses, potentially including our own,” the exec said yesterday.
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Smith shared a series of four principles that will guide Microsoft’s approach regarding unionization efforts, which you can read below:
- We believe in the importance of listening to our employees’ concerns.
- We recognize that employees have a legal right to choose whether to form or join a union.
- We are committed to creative and collaborative approaches with unions when employees wish to exercise their rights and Microsoft is presented with a specific unionization proposal.
- Building on our global labor experiences, we are dedicated to maintaining a close relationship and shared partnership with all our employees, including those represented by a union.
“We believe Microsoft’s stakeholders will be served best with an open and constructive approach based on the following four principles,” Smith said yesterday. However, the exec also emphasized that “our employees will never need to organize to have a dialogue with Microsoft’s leaders.”