Activision Blizzard is under fire once again after a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claimed the company has been trying to silence employees. 

The Communications Workers of America has filed an "unfair labor charge" against Blizzard after higher-ups told employees that they could no longer discuss issues related to the gender discrimination lawsuit. The union added that employees have the legal right to discuss the lawsuit along with their working conditions and experiences at Blizzard. 

The complaint stemmed from an employee sharing an article about the lawsuit in the company's Slack and stating that the company should be held accountable. In response, a manager threatened the employee for discussing the matter. 

Former Blizzard employee Jessica Gonzalez stated in the Communications Workers of America's press release on the matter that this is nothing new for the company. According to the former senior test analyst, the company often retaliates against employees who speak out and it's only become worse. 

This is unfortunately not uncommon behavior for Blizzard. Late last year, Blizzard employees formed a union but the company refused to recognize it. While initially intimidating and attempting to dissuade employees from joining the union, the company took it further in January of 2022 by attempting to hinder the union's right to organize. 

"We, the supermajority of workers at Raven QA, are proud to be confidently filing our petition with the NLRB for our union election.  We are deeply disappointed that Raven Software and Activision Blizzard refused to uplift workers' rights by choosing to not voluntarily recognize our union in spite of our supermajority support," the Game Workers Alliance said on social media at the time. 

Blizzard has been in the spotlight since July of 2020 for a gender discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuit. Since then, it's come to light that a former female employee committed suicide after being pursued by her boss and that male employees were stealing milk from breastfeeding employees. Throughout the accusations, Blizzard and higher-up employees have been accused of denying the experiences, intimidating employees for sharing their experiences, and not making impactful changes to the work environment.