Electronic Arts Facing Possible Class Action Lawsuit

As a follow-up to yesterday's story about a frustrated EA employee's spouse, several readers wrote in to report that EA is now facing a possible class action lawsuit from disgruntled employees. Besides the Gamespot coverage, Kotaku has a discussion of it as well. To add to the "frustrated EA worker" momentum, a former employee named Joe Straitiff has posted about his experiences as well. From his post: "So I'm posting under my real name -- you have to stand up to this type of thing or it will continue. And every company will become EA so that can compete... Remember, you can't spell ExploitAtion without EA."

Comments

A few thoughts

[slusich]

First of all, everyone always needs to keep in mind that HR is not there for the benefit of the employees. That's what every company tells you, but the truth is, HR's job is to protect the corperation. Never trust an HR employee to look out for your best interest. That being said, EA's HR department has obviously failed them by allowing things to get to this point. They should have kept pay and hours legal within the bounds of the state law. And did anyone else notice the featured game on the gamespot article? Sims2 by EA.

Re:pufft

[Proney]

true

Re:just quit

[Garse Janacek]

As long as the consumers keep buying products from them and workers keep applying for their jobs, they have absolutely no incentives to quit their practice.

In a completely free market (which the US is not), that would be true. That's why there are federal and state laws to protect workers from these sorts of situations. While we may not know conclusively for a while, it looks like there's substantial evidence that EA is violating some of those laws. By all means, boycott their products, but there should be some other way of checking this behavior (such as this lawsuit, although there may be other approaches as well).

Especially given the turnover rate, it seems like the only reason EA gets so many people who want to work for them is because they are a big name in a popular industry, and they lie to people about what the jobs entail. Hopefully the lawsuit, even if it fails, will bring more attention to EA's behavior, lowering the available pool for new hires, so that they are eventually forced to change their practices.

Corporate Politics

[null etc.]

It's a real shame this guy hasn't been around the block a few times with regards to management. There are some very clear actions he could have taken to ensure that the noose wasn't just around his neck, but also around the next of his supervisor and HR contact.

Just some examples:

• Get all job requirements in writing or email. If your boss asks you to complete something, send him an email asking him to verify the scope and priority of the work to be performed. If necessary, use clauses such as "Do you agree that until completion of this task, this task takes precedence over all other requests made of me, unless otherwise communicated by you?"
• Get all reprimands in writing or email, and get as much clarification as possible. If your boss reprimands you verbally, follow up with an email asking him if your interpretation of his reprimand is correct. Ask him to describe or verify the actions that will be required to resolve the issue.
• Follow up on every contradiction. If your boss says "good job" one day, and yells at you the next, ask him via email to clarify the situation so that you can take steps to avoid repeating the situation. This is especially important if you need to represent yourself as a dutiful employee during future lawsuits.
• Ask to be educated about the formal HR policies for reprimand. Many companies, in order to avoid lawsuits, have clearly defined policies for reprimanding employees. These include written warning, signed by the employee; mandatory HR sessions upon reprimand; follow-up performance evaluations, etc. Some companies get lazy and stop following the policies they've defined. If so, your lawsuit will be much stronger! Try to get all reprimands processes as clearly and officially as possible. This will require your employer to make clear and rational decisions regarding your reprimand, unless they want to risk facing an unlawful termination suit.
• Save all email. During a lawsuit, your lawyer will need emails that may be years old, in order to make certain cases such as "this company promoted an atmosphere of such and such, as evidenced by these emails going as far back as..." I know of a lawsuit in which an employee saved his spam, and used that as evidence that the company wasn't serious about enforcing "corporate use only" policies.

Re:Former EA Employees?

[rogueuk]

I thought the japanese had the highest life expectancy.

This says they are #1 on the list while the US is #24...

You'd think that about Hollywood, wouldn't you

[Sagarian]

A business (the movie business), with an unstable labor pool (infinite supply of people with stars in their eyes), short project lifespans (1-2 years), ...

yet there is a Screen Actors' Guild.

Don't quit, that's just what they want you to do

[Thagg]

Seriously, quitting is almost certainly painless to EA, as they can get other people to do the job pretty easily. Just send an email saying that you're only going to work 50 hours a week, and stick to it, and see what happens.

Because firing people has consequences. I run a small visual effects production company, and we hire freelance people as we get projects, for the length of the project. The State of California doesn't see it that way, though, and to the state it appears that we hire and fire people at a high rate.

This causes our unemployment insurance rate to be insanely high -- we pay about 10% of our employee's earnings into the state unemployment insurance system. Now, we consider that the cost of doing business -- we could even avoid it if we wanted to by various means but it does seem to us a reasonable price to pay for the privilege of hiring people just when we need them.

But, if EA's unemployment insurance rate skyrocketed, it'd hit them right in the wallet. They might even do something about it.

Just a suggestion. Any EA exec reading this (Hi!) can thank me privately -- as you must know, long term, that these "crunch" policies will destroy the company.

Thad

Observation from a former EA Sports programmer

[dstone]

Programmers line up at the door to EA (and other studios) to get jobs in that industry. They jump through the interviews and HR hoops. They work as 9-5 institutional programmers, government contractors, MCSEs, or anything, hoping to score an opportunity to make games. Not everyone wants this, of course, but believe it or not, thousands and thousands of people look forward to working extremely long hours to make video games. Let those people apply and work the jobs. If everyone walked out of EA today because of unfulfilled expectations, their desks would be filled in fairly short order by people who want those jobs for the guts and glory. The unionizers amongst you may call these people 'scabs', I suppose.

Aspiring game programmers write games in their spare time, graphics demos, etc. and put these things together in a portfolio to apply for a paid job as a game programmer. I know; I did this, I write code, and I hire other coders. Show me another industry where you'll work for hundreds and hundreds of hours on your own time to craft a software demo to impress a potential banking/government/oil&gas employer...

You could argue that programmers are lined up to work there because economic times are hard for the North American programmer right now. If you've been watching the games industry for the last 15 years or so, you'd know that programmers have been begging to work at video game studios (large and small) constantly, through boom times and bust. Not so true of other (less glorious?) programming specialties.

During the late nineties boom times, I can assure you that the hours worked at EA Sports were brutal. I was there, coding like a monkey, and it was just fine. We all could have left; there were lots of opportunities to make more money in software for less hours. So... Different economic climate now, but what's constant? What's constant over the decades is the fact that plenty of people are willing to work unusually long hours to make video games (and other software). If game programmers see no glory in that sacrifice, why on earth did they get into video games?

"They shouldn't have to work so much" is mostly what I'm hearing. Not an argument. They don't have to. If EA is breaking laws, nail them to the wall. But if they're matching a certain personality type and inner drive to really hard jobs, and there's a clear pattern of people freely willing to leave easier positions to code games, well, then chalk one up for EA finding a good business model.

The other thing to consider, is that things have an end to them, and jobs don't need to last for 20 years. Some jobs simply can't because of their demands. There are jobs so physically and mentally demanding that they're simply not life-long jobs. Maybe game programming is like that.

My Short Union-Story

[eugene ts wong]

I worked for a company stocking shelves. It's not admirable, and I take responsibility for it. However, they were a union store. I earned minimum wages, so that means after union dues, I earned less than minimum wages. The union sure wasn't too helpful to me. The supervisor was verbally abusive too, in my opinion.

I hate unions a lot.

Re:EA will just Close up shop here and move to Ind

[Zip In The Wire]

Let them. Using fear of outsourcing to control people is a bluff that needs to be called. I think they would have done so already if they could. Everyone assumes that third world countries are populated with slaves but it just isn't true. Many of these countries are socialist and employess have more rights that in the U.S.

I know someone who moved his company to Mexico, expecting a windfall profit hiring cheap employees. Well, it turned out that labor laws in Mexico are much more strict that in the U.S. and it cost him more than it would have here.

For example, when you fire someone down there you have to give them 3 months pay PLUS a christmas bonus. I'm not joking. While he did pay less hourly for people, he got raped by lawsuits, no count good for nothing slackers that had to be paid 3 months pay to be fired, and employees stealing equipment so that in the end it just wasn't worth it.

Also, many managers are hands on people and just can't manage a remote project. I've managed outsource teams myself and most of the code had to be re-written by local talent.

So let them outsource. I dare them.