EA Reconsiders Overtime Position 511
bippy writes "An internal memo leaked from EA to its employees says that the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime. Rusty Rueff, senior vice president of human resources, bemoans the bad press and begs forgiveness: "As much as I don't like what's been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth." GamesIndustry.biz has commentary on the story as well.
It's about time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's about time. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is supposed to imply that a salary-based schedule allows professionals a little flexibility in their work hours not like the poor blue-collar bastards that have to punch a clock.
Salary was supposed to mean that some weeks you work a little more, some weeks a little less, but in general you puting 40 hours a week. The entire concept of salary is meaningless if your continued employment depends upon you working 60+ hours a week.
Everyone, except (Score:3, Insightful)
No sir. Not gonna happen. Absolutely not. I assure you.
Re:Everyone, except (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember a representitive from EA visiting Carleton University to talk a little bit about game development and EA's corporate culture.
Do you know what the worst sin is when you work for EA?
Not shipping a sequel on time (for Summer/Christmas holidays or when a new season of NHL/NBA/NASCAR starts).
He stressed the fact that EA is not about creating new ideas, but relying on "tried and tested concepts". He said, if you want to work on experimental stuff you better join a indepen
Yeah, but they don't say *how* (Score:2)
I agree with you, 100%.
the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime.
Probably by giving pink slips to anyone who complains, thereby allowing them to find jobs somewhere else where overtime is a possibility.
Re:Everyone, except (Score:2)
Re:Everyone, except (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Everyone, except (Score:2)
Re:Everyone, except (Score:5, Informative)
from http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/WageOrderIndustries.htm [ca.gov]
order number 4. That's the one posted in our breakroom.
http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWCArticle4.html [ca.gov]
Look under 1 A 3 (h) and (i)
Enjoy.
behold... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wheee,
-- RLJ
Hey EA... (Score:5, Insightful)
re: hey EA... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. ticked off developer who sees this as nothing but HRspeke for "we feel your pain" and expect this to amount to nothing more than a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
2. happy developer who wants people to know that EA is trying to address some serious problems.
3. EA's PR group.
ed
leaked? whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:leaked? whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for a Fortune 500 software maker (non-games), and we get promises like this all the time. In fact, I was just talking to a co-worker who was promised that they were eliminating overtime this season. Last year, he worked Saturdays during the crunch. This year, it's been Saturday and Sundays. And this is a totally seasonal job, very predictable. This is not a company pushing to meet some artificial marketing-inflicted deadline.
The bottom line is that big companies will continue to find new and creative ways to milk productivity from people at the lowest cost possible. The game industry is no different than any other industry.
Re:leaked? whatever. (Score:2)
They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
EA will have to earn trust again (Score:3, Insightful)
"They're damned if they do, damned if they don't."
More like "they're damned until they ACTUALLY do - often". EA has been tilted so heavily toward the "damned if they don't" side of being upfront and fair, it's going to take a lot of "do's" to earn folks' trust again.
And this would be a great way to start.
Re:leaked? whatever. (Score:2)
The changes would have happened first, instead of being "announced." Their employees shouldn't have been treated like shit in the first place.
Re:leaked? whatever. (Score:3, Interesting)
Back to the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Therefore you support mistreating workers. You can't have it both ways.
My grandfather worked in the textile mills in Lawrence, MA, circa 1905. You worked every day for 12 hours including Saturday, and you worked hard, and if you were sick and didn't show up or you didn't work as hard as you were supposed to, then they fired you, and there were a zillion immigrants standing outside shivering waiting to take your job.
You got paid by how much cloth you wove. If your loom broke, you sat there idle, thinking about how you were going to put food on the table that evening if the loom fixer didn't come by in time.
The foreman would actually walk up and down the line of weavers and put his hand on their backs to see who was sweating and who wasn't, and God forbid you weren't a sweaty bastard like the rest of the slaves, because you were gone instantly.
I have a problem with this. So should you. There is nothing conceptually different between the Lawrence mills and the environment people are describing at EA. Just wait for EA to open its "Bangalore technology center," if it hasn't done so already and I missed it.
That's why there are labor laws. That's why unions were formed. If you let businesses make people work like slaves, pretty soon everyone will be working like slaves, and then we'll all be slaves.
So it has to be stopped, and this HR asshole can whine all he wants about EA "discovering" that it is understaffing its projects and overworking its employees (after developing how many games, now? Come on. What a crock of shit). Anyone who didn't know whose side HR is on should read this guy's memo carefully. He promises nothing. He pretends surprise. He cajoles. He soothes. He's worried about the process. He's got great ideas for the future. The labor laws on the books are obsolete, and just don't apply to EA or other high tech jobs. Because high tech "creative" people are special. They need to work 80 hours a week. California should recognize this. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah right. The guy makes me puke, as does every other HR asshole I've ever worked with, both in senior management and as a programming grunt.
Re:Back to the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
HR operates on a set of three principals not unlike those of Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.
1) HR must protect the company / corporate entity at all costs.
2) HR must protect the executives & managers of a company (in order of seniority) unless that conflicts with law 1.
3) HR must protect the companies employees unless that conflicts with law 1 or 2.
Hope this helps some of you out there, as I learned this from personal experience.
-nB
Broken promises? (Score:3, Funny)
Double speaking money pinchers (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, we didn't want to pay overtime.
Gah. Dil-bert!
Re:Double speaking money pinchers (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation: "You sit on your ass all day and hardly break a sweat. Why the hell do you need overtime? So what if you never see the light of day or your family?"
Repeat after me, people: "This wouldn't happen if we had a union."
This wouldn't happen if we had a union (Score:5, Insightful)
In the software development realm, some programmers are 100x more productive than others. Many times there are more than 2x productivity differences between workers.
When you move to unionized protection for the workforce, you are essentially mandating compensation for producers to be normalized. Even though you might be 5x more productive than your cube neighbor, your compensation will not reflect that value difference.
When you're talking about manual production activities - assembly line manufacturing, product delivery (bread suppliers) etc - it makes perfect sense because each breaed delivery person has a maximum capacity that he can accomplish, and the variance in production can easily be normalized and compensation level can more easily be established.
In this industry, do you really want to have collective bargaining where the people who are the most productive derive the least benefit from exercising their talents? If you can accomplish more in 2 hours than your coworkers, should you need to put in a full workday to be compensated the same as they are?
I'm not convinced that the traditional model of collective bargaining is a great solution to this problem.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union (Score:2)
My brother-in-law is a union carpenter. He described how he did nothing but cut wood for three years until he had the experience to move on to another job. With a tech union we could determine qualifications, not let Microsoft or Novell or Red Hat use tests designed to maximize their profits to determine who has what experience.
Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union (Score:4, Insightful)
Look around your cube farm and point to the best developer in your group. You know, the one that actually does 5 to 100 times more work than anyone else.
Now, go over to him and tell him your salary and ask him if he makes 5 to 100 times more than you do.
When he say, "no", feel free to laugh at him. Now explain to him that under a union he still wouldn't be making 5 to 100 times more than you, and therefore he should be glad that there isn't a union.
Now, go back to posting on slashdot.
High producers (Score:5, Insightful)
1. He makes ~2-2.5x what the low producer does
2. He gets selected for the interesting problems (And gets to say - I don't want to work on that project.)
3. He is highly regarded by his peers for being sharp - in many cases that's worth more than money. (At least to geeks it can be.)
4. Management gives much greater latitude in terms of work hours - because they know that they can count on that person when the chips are down.
Finally, it's important to note that many times our techies are led down the primrose path of believing that technical prowess is the most important measure of achievement.
As a result I know a couple of really sharp developers in our organization who are treated scornfully by management. These people are brilliant, but their attitude and approach make them distasteful to everyone else who "doesn't get it" because they are "stupid" and management people are "idiots."
People skills are critical to success, unless you're a genius on the order of John Carmack. People skills are directly related to compensation - far more than technical skills - this is why people think that their bosses are morons and all management types are idiots. The world measures on a different scale than geeks do. Unions won't fix that.
Thanks for inviting me to post more on slashdot!
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union (Score:2)
In fact, the employees should be the ones casting judgement on the operational competency of the executives, since the employees have a better idea than
Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union (Score:5, Insightful)
As a result, except for personal pride and professionalism, which ought to be enough, there really is no benefit to being that more productive person in most cases. And when crunch time happens, it happens to the whole team. And if a union can guarantee you get paid for those extra hours, then perhaps it can be of use in this industry.
Re:Double speaking money pinchers (Score:4, Interesting)
It's fine that so many kids just out of college are willing to put in absurd hours because they don't know any better. But by the time they actually figure out how to do their job well (and it will be a few years), they might have pesky distractions like families, hobbies, etc.
The wizened old geezer of thirty is going to have a certain level of comprehension that he lacked when he was twenty-four and fresh out of college. But the management, in its infinite wisdom, only looks at the hours put in, and figures that if they won't put in the same number of hours as the college grad, then it would be inefficient not to replace the geezer with the grad. Hence, the geezer's choice is between massive overwork his entire career, and taking his hard-won knowledge and exiting the industry.
Hell, unionization would be a huge service to the game industry, but they're too focused on crunching out the next Mary Kate and Ashley crapware on an unrealistic deadline to notice.
Okay, that was funnier before Acclaim went under.
Re:Double speaking money pinchers (Score:4, Insightful)
"In other words, we didn't want to pay overtime. "
More like,
"Not because we didn't want to pay overtime. Because we didn't have to pay overtime."
chyld
Re:Double speaking money pinchers (Score:3, Interesting)
A significant fraction of games developers are earning more than this rate, so while they may get paid for the hours they work, they don't get 'overtime'.
A possibility is that EA is going to internally classify these jobs as eligable fo
Re:Double speaking money pinchers (Score:2)
Utter BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm in that case, hire more people
Moderate this comment
Re:Utter BS (Score:2)
Ultimately, things like this are expensive to make. Movies are expensive. Yet, thousands still are made worldwide, and still are overall profitable. (for now).
Re:Utter BS (Score:2)
Movies (much like computer games) are largely unprofitable. The makers rely on a few big hits to cover the losses made by the rest.
Re:Utter BS (Score:2)
That's right.
But programmer unions? Naah, I don't think so.
Re:Utter BS (Score:4, Informative)
In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
If EA was really concerned about its employees ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If EA was really concerned about its employees (Score:2)
Update (Score:5, Funny)
Whoops, just kidding, the memo linked there is wrong; GamesIndustry.biz was apparently hoaxed into putting an EA memo on its site that wasn't actually written by EA. EA has no plans to clean up its act and no plans to compensate its workers. Hope this clears things up.
Apologies to M
Suprised... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm almost wondering if that memo wasn't purposefully released as a PR move...
Re:Suprised... (Score:2)
Re: EA cares? Who does? (Score:3, Funny)
Up next: Wal-mart (Score:2, Interesting)
Like EA, Wal-mart took great pains to deny its workers overtime (or promotion, if you happen to be female), and like EA they were eventually called out on it. Unlike EA, they are maintaining that it is necessary to their business model of offering a gallon jar of pickles for $3 that they not deviate from paying minimum wage. And if the employees don't get the store cleaned up in their allotted time slot, well then they better not object to
What's he getting at, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Balderdash. What's wrong with paying someone more for more work? There's nothing in the hourly wage model that requires set schedules. The only argument I can read into this is, "well, it's just not done," or "hourly pay is just old-fashioned."
It sounds to me like not wanting to pay overtime is exactly why they've resisted classifying people as "eligible" for overtime.
Well, I think work is work, whether it's on an assembly line or writing software, and it takes time that a lot of people would use for something else, if they didn't need to earn a living. That's why they call it work, and not fun.
Time's the most valuable commodity we can give somebody else, because once it's given, it's gone for good. I don't think it's asking too much to be compensated proportionately for it.
Surely I'm missing something here. What is it?
Re:What's he getting at, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
EA is suggesting that because creative people traditionally work "flexible" (i.e., long/obsessive) schedules, EA doesn't need to pay them more for their time. That's crap, of course. Anyone who is self-employed has experienced long hours; but the rewards of self-employment aren't present when you sign your soul away to make NHL 2006 in an EA sweatshop.
There's a second audience for this memo, too: lawmakers. EA is begging the GOP to give it legislation that will protect its massive profits from the fair and just demands of its workforce. I bet they get it. This will be a useful lesson for the right wing kids--and for right wing adults--who are going to discover first-hand what they've voted for: their own economic exploitation.
Re:What's he getting at, anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) EA - takes advantage of 'outdated' laws to screw their employees
2) EA is lobbying the GOP for laws that will make it impossible for anyone to sue them for screwing their employees
3) GOP will probably pass such laws if given the chance, because we all know how pro-worker they are.
See? Short, easy path. Also, it wasn't so much as a "Down with republicans" rant, as it was an "I can't believe all these morons that think the GOP actually
Re:What's he getting at, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue here - and I want to emphasize again that I am not endorsing EA's position, just trying to explain the aforementioned kernel of truth - is that overtime rules don't really apply well to our current economy. They are built with very fixed limits: for example, 80 or 90 hours in a two-week period. If an employee goes past that limit, his employer has to pay him OT... even if both parties are happy with alternate forms of compensation. This may seem odd, but the goal, back when the rules were made, was to discourage OT entirely.
But nowadays more and more employers are realizing the value of flex time. Not just daily flex time ("Come in whenever you want, as long as you work 8 hours") but weekly and even monthly flex time. Don't like working Fridays? Work 10-hour days instead. Like 4-day weekends? Put in 60 hours a week and you'll get two of 'em a month. That's a sort of flexibility which most labor laws don't allow. (Well, they clearly do allow it if you're tricky, but they aren't supposed to. So the fear is that legislatures will enforce the letter of the law and close up loopholes rather than reforming the law, which is what they should do.)
EA mentioned artists for a reason. Artists are notoriously, or perhaps stereotypically, unstructured. They are the poster children for flex time. If a fit of inspiration hits you and you work 120 hours in two weeks, well, you should be able to do that - and then your employer can give you two weeks off to get over the inevitable burnout.
I want to say it a third time because this sounds like I'm supporting what EA does: I am not. An important component of long-term flex time like I've been describing is compensation for the periods where you work unusually long hours. EA does not appear to be offering that compensation. That's a big problem. But, well... Just because EA is saying "Labor laws are broken" doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. It just means they're poor advocates.
Re:What's he getting at, anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really (Score:3, Informative)
Secretly violating the law to line your pocket doesn't qualify. Civil disobedience is public defiance of injustice. Acts of private venality don't qualify.
slave drivers (Score:2)
Overtime is a good thing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reward for working hard should be compsensation not more work. If the higher ups aren't willing to be liberial with "comp time" or project bonuses then expect some unhappy workers. Killing morale does not help the company at all.
Volunteer labour (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like the woman at the office who's husband sends flowers to every day. All the other women in the office adore this unseen male, but be sure that all the men in the office hate this guy for making them look bad.
Seems that everyone goes about their job (and love, for that matter) in different ways. Over-management and over-regulation do strange things to the human spirit.
smoke screen (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever it takes to help them churn out the next ShaqFu.
Yeah and.. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah and.. (Score:2)
Get in touch with EA's HR department. You're just the kind of suck... err... motivated artist they like to exploi... umm, that is... add to their highly valued team. But before you get any funny ideas, remember that "value" in this case doesn't imply "worth paying."
Re:Yeah and.. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's people like you who are causing these problems. So many people fought extremely hard for 35-40 hour work weeks, and you're ready to throw it all away so your name is in a list of credits that 3 people will ever read.
Re:Yeah and.. (Score:2)
We don't have to accept this shit and something can and should be done about it.
He seems at a loss for how to fix the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He seems at a loss for how to fix the problem (Score:2)
for 1 week in a month, year, 2 years?
I agree with this though. I think it's dangerouus to the compnay to have workers toiling more than 60 hours/week.
Re:How about capping it at 40 (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, if I'm underutilized in a small group, I will always ask if I can help out, and will gladly pitch in to get things done. But don't expect to see me reading
(I should be speaking in past tense, as I work for myself now. When I'm busy, I work late
So tempting... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I *do* want however is for them to get a clue in a very big way, particularly as far as MMORPGs are concerned. UO is still headed for the gurgler and gaining speed, and The Sims Online has become an online sex pests' paradise, when the game was not originally intended for anything even remotely like that.
Electronic Arts needs radical reform...at the core ideological level. That article on here a few weeks back by the college professor showed me that...when he talked about EA's execs thinking of the company as being simply a vendor of boxes. If they don't get that reform, then they *will* sink. It won't happen overnight perhaps, but it will gradually happen. They need to start innovating again, and they need to prevent the soulless bean-counters from being in charge. There is more to games...and life itself...than *just* money...and if you don't realise that, eventually you'll get to a point where you're not making money either.
Re:So tempting... (Score:2)
What makes you thing that anything of these aquired companies conti
Some? (Score:2)
If they're working over their salaried time then they are required by law to recieve overtime or comp.
Re:Some? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're working over their salaried time then they are required by law to recieve overtime or comp.
That's what the employees believe, but labor laws are not so simple. EA has classified these employees as exempt from overtime status, which they're legally allowed to do under certain circumstances (for example, if an employee works on a contract or salary basis in a computer-related field, and is often asked to "use his or he
Symptom of a larger disease... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's in the game! (Score:2, Funny)
Internal e-mails are usually written to be public (Score:2)
Also keep in mind that the goals of the HR department and other management may be different. Often HR is looking out for employes, while other management may have other goals.
Re:Internal e-mails are usually written to be publ (Score:2)
No, the purpose of the HR department is to minimize the chances of the company being sued. Any benefit to the employees is mostly a side effect of that primary goal.
Employee rights are DYING (Score:2)
And don't give me that crap about working harder and getting 200 certificates instead of just 100. We are in the cross-hairs of corporation desire for cheaper, more docile labor. Globalism
More business speak translations... (Score:4, Funny)
Similar Situation (Score:2)
More of the same (Score:5, Interesting)
The EA management team should be paraded around the town square a whipped with wet noodles (or harsher) , pelted with whatever gum can be pried off the sidewalk, and humiliated in what ever manner seen fit. It is completely true that the ones that make the big salaries don't give much of a care about those minions below pumped for the bulk of the grunt work.
True, we (the worker geeks) used to be the cool ones a few years back. But that was then and now, it's back to the same 'ol same 'ol where the execs once again have the spotlight, the workers know their place, and the economy favors mostly those on top.
Frankly, I'm not much of an game player and will make it a point to specifically not buy EA games anymore - for myself or anyone else.
The leaked memo needs to go much further and pretty much include everyone in overtime rules. The fact that some will be looked at leads to a bunch of magic hand waving while the practices continue. EA's made a boat load of cash and should share the wealth with those who are probably most responsible for it.
But alas, the top execs and management need to maintain their pecking order and paychecks so their lifestyles can continue. Such is the way of things.
My advice to EA employees: stage a mass demonstration or walk out - organize! It's no fair that you get crap from all the hard work while others reap the real benefits.
I really hope the class action yields some cash for those who deserve and more bad press for EA and in fact, the rest of the software industry where this happens more than not. This type of work is not sustainable and we Americans need to stand up for better jobs and better working conditions (gee, that sounds historically fimiliar). Otherwise, companies will take everything they can, including your life.
How about not working your employees to death? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Leak?"... Hardly... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen the solution to this problem (Score:5, Interesting)
at a former employer. Company policy required managers to be present any time their employees were working overtime. As you can guess, we had to get management permission to work overtime, which was granted only when it was really needed. An interesting side effect is that our managers became very good at estimating the time needed for a project, and we were almost never late - with or without overtime.
Key paragraph diassembled. (Score:5, Interesting)
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year.
We have no concrete plans to do anything at this time, but we do plan to talk among ourselves about it, and we're making sure you know we're planning on talking about it so that your hopes are raised without any actual promises of anybody getting overtime pay.
We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime,
Government regulators held a gun to our head and told us we couldn't even though we really, really wanted to.
but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies
OK, even you won't buy something that stupid. The truth is we knowingly broke the law because we thought it should not apply to us.
the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer
We hire young naive idealists and milk them for all they are worth. When they wise up, well, there's a sucker born every minute.
We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility
Clarification: by "flexibility" we don't mean that you will get to choose when to work -- it means that we know you value management's flexibility to choose for you.
but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
We haven't figured out how to control project schedules. Learning how to do this is harder than getting the laws changed so we can put the onus for delivering poorly planned projects on you
OK, I'm not a huge fan of unions, but they're looking better every minute.
Marx's Labor Theory of Value (Score:3, Interesting)
It's mobility, not value (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say this: the reason that unfair labor practices are possible is that capital is inherently more mobile than labor. It's the disparity in mobility that creates i
I'm not holding my beath (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't if employees are exempt or not but about EA abusing them; it appears to be about EA not compensating their employees fairly and demanding insane work weeks.
Bill
Cynical hat on (Score:3, Interesting)
While his statements aren't this silly, I really doubt that he was unaware of the problem. This seems like a spin move to disrupt employee solidarity and the possible class action lawsuit that is being organized. It's exactly what I would do to try to drive a pre-emptive wedge in their ranks and avoid a costly lawsuit.
A good way to bring the heat on for EA (Score:3, Interesting)
This will not pass (Score:4, Insightful)
The last few weeks of reading blogs and the media about EA culture and work practices have not been easy. I know personally how hard it is when so much of the news seems negative.
Yeah, cause it means that HR has to put in our full 40 hours just to answer all the emails from you and the boss about how we're not keeping a better lid on this stuff.
We have purposefully not responded to web logs and the media because the best way to communicate is directly with you, our team members.
As much as I dont like whats been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth: the work is getting harder, the tasks are more complex and the hours needed to accomplish them have become a burden. We havent yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
Okay, lets stop right here. This is a company with vast resources and development history. They can't get one guy to go back and look at the last few years and tell them how many man-hours it's going to take to develop the next game? I'm not talking down to the minute - they're clearly under-staffed by about 40-70% if the reports are true. You can't get me a WAG within 10% and hire-up? I call bullshit in the biggest way. Only the most incompetent manager would underestimate time this badly when they have a known track record.
Classic avoidance of the issue by peer pressure. "Everybody else is working overtime, it's the industry standard...get used to it." It's the standard because nobody is willing stand up and put a stop to the pre-industrial-revolution working conditions.
Three weeks ago we issued our bi-annual Talk Back Survey and more than 80 percent of you participated much higher than the norm for a company our size. That tells me you care and are committed to making EA better.
Human nature predicts that the majority of people will only speak up when they are dissatified, and want change. If things are going well, there's no need to cause a commotion. Looking at the turn out in elections is a prime example of this phenominon.
In the next 30 days well have the survey results and we will share them openly with you by the middle of January.
What, no raw data? Thirty days is a long time to tally the multiple choice - how bout a sneak preview?
Your feedback in the Talk Back Survey will help us make changes in the coming year, but were not waiting some changes are already in the works in the Studios. Here are just a few:
Nothing but some techincal changes here. Good, but unless you're going to admit that such a large company is randomly re-developing things so badly as to waste hoards of man-hours, I'm going to say that this is band-aid stuff that'll (maybe) take an hour off the typical workweek if you keep the product the same. In reality, it will just allow more work to be done in the existing time, and expectations of output to rise. With all the productivity software out there, we should be working 12 hour weeks, based on what was done thirty years ago.
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year.
Sounds good, but this is just consideration...not the actual reclassification. They'll probably decide what they have is good.
We have resisted this in the past, not because we dont want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology
Re:Fill me in (Score:4, Funny)
This is games.slashdot.org.
EA is the only game company. Any supposed "other" game companies are either worthless, or EA just hasn't gotten around to acquiring them yet.
Re:Fill me in (Score:2)
Re:Fill me in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fill me in (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus, talk about cynicism. I'm guessing you don't work in the tech industry or you'd know exactly why the EA story is a big story, and hint, it's not what you seem to believe.
The EA story is a big story because the problems at EA are endemic to the video game industry, and are at least somewhat prevalent in the IT industry as well. Employees who by law should not be treated as exempt are being treated as exempt. Being that this is a tech news site, and being that EA is such a large company, what happens at EA in this case could have a big impact on the tech industry in general. This is a chance to improve the quality of life for tech workers across the country.
That's the idealist response. The most cynical I'd ever get about this, though, would be to say that this is a large company that its employees believe are breaking the law, and it's always news when large companies break the law on a large-scale basis. Either way, it's news, and I hope this site continues to follow it.
Re:Fill me in (Score:5, Interesting)
True, and I tend to side with you on this one. But this is another case of an employer exploiting its workforce to a degree that's arguably criminal. Remember the genesis of labor unions was at a time where ungodly workdays and incredibly cruel punishment was seen as the norm, and often these people didn't have a choice, they were just happy to have a job. You'd think that the talent being hired at EA would be an exception, but the trap seems to be this idealism that game developers have about making games - the sort of rose-colored glasses mentality that comes from playing games all your life and getting to work on the next big one. EA's the big dog on the block, so it's no wonder they're recruiting people that will work themselves to the bone for them.
This is a step that's long overdue, it was a matter of time before some company pushed idealistic people like these game developers (or music industry interns, film students, etc) past their limits and undercompensated them for it. Argue what you want about how you would handle the situation, but I prefer to live in a country whose laws allow me to push back on an employer I feel is treating me badly rather than slink away and declare some kind of moral victory. EA would have continued this nonsense had we not seen the snowball effect from ea_spouse and others airing their grievances. They are well within their rights to do so and we shouldn't criticize them for it.
Re:Fill me in (Score:4, Interesting)
Well it's not the extra hours per se. It's the fact that the workers aren't being paid for those hours.
Yes, the EA workers should quit. Their not working 40 hours for $60k, their working two 40 hour jobs for $30k.
Re:Fill me in (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful! (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easy to decry the apparent greed of lawyers, but at the end of the day, sometimes the only thing that you can use is the courts. A lot of times justice isn't served, but often enough that there is hope.
Mod parent up!
Re:Fill me in (Score:3, Insightful)
No. A lot of people would be much worse off, and a few would be much better off. The reason corporations hate lawyers and class action lawsuites is because it enables the plebs to band togother and actually enforce the law. That's it. Courts find against you, if you broke the law. It may be civil law, but it's still the law.
The reason why money is involved, is because that's the only thing courts
Re:Reducing overtime pay.. (Score:2)
Re:Reducing overtime pay.. (Score:4, Interesting)
More like a choice between unpaid overtime and unionization. Workers aren't the powerless peons your comment makes them out to be.
Re:Reducing overtime pay.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh, what? (Score:2)
Re:So where's the apology? The backpay? (Score:3, Insightful)