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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."
Isn't that like, the whole gaming industry?
that this ties them up in litigation enough that it distracts them from their core business of buying up creative game developers and destroying anything that was good about them.
John Madden says, "You just hate to see that!"
FORM A UNION It worked for GM workers who faced similar situations back in 1937. Stick together and they can't stop you...but then again, in this world where everybody is out for themselves, you've probably screwed.
EA will not retaliate against employees for exercising legal rights, including by participating in the proposed class action.
In other words, your jobs are going overseas. You have the right to look for another job, and we won't discriminate against you for that.
Was it good for you, too?
Rb
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.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWThe response will be to outsource your jobs at EA. Hopefully folks will learn the lesson; organize and plan for the worst when times are good and companies need the services you, as an employee, provide.
It's sad but I can't imagine any large company making concessions to it's employees in the current political climate.
Does anyone know how many of EA's employees are contractors, BTW?
-_-
"Starting this week and lasting through the end of the season, you can get the #1-selling lawsuit game for an unbelievable $29.95!"
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I'm sure a lot of talented Eastern European, Indian, and Chinese developers wouldn't mind being exploited by EA.
uhm... you realize that not everyone has the luxuary of quitting a job. see, most people have things called bills. some have a mortage, car payments, insurance, KIDS, etc etc. Just up and quitting a job isn't necessarily an option because these things have deadlines on them every month, kids have constant needs, food, clothes, blah blah blah. Computer and tech jobs are hard enough to find as it is, quitting is not an option unless you have enough in your bank account to sustain living for weeks or months before you find another job. think before you open your mouth. There's no reason a company in the U.S. should be operated like this, people have rights, it seems EA isn't obeying these rights. Common curtesy is a big thing for me too, with my current employer if they try to back me into a wall, i fire right back and put them against the wall, one of the good things about being in a union. These people are standing up for themselves. it's nice to know YOU can quit, but not everyone can, they need income.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
"Remember, you can't spell ExploitAtion without EA." No, but you can spell "Out of work" without it. In many states (including mine) the employer doesn't need ANY reason to terminate an employee. Period.
The problem at EA is the same reason unions were first started, over 100 years ago. Employers would drive their employees to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion with little compensation (monetary or otherwise) to show for it. Today, unions have become nothing but organized gangs out for political power, but their original purpose was valid. There aren't an infinite number of jobs available out there, so if a person quits working at EA, they aren't guaranteed to get a job anywhere else, and then their family starves. Sometimes you have to keep working at a job that is terrible because the consequences of quitting are even more terrible. I think EA (like other gaming companies) should stop rushing junk out the door, and if they use a reasonable, efficient methodology (i.e. extreme programming, or something along those lines) then they will not have the infamous crunch time.
Ah, nothing like a trailer-park social darwinist to get the juices flowing first thing in the morning. Has it ever occured to you that some of these people have families and bills to pay? Quitting a job is sometimes not an option for folks who have to make decisions based on criteria other than lifestyle. I'm so sick of the current American/Hobbesian worldview of "each man against all men". We have a name for creatures that endorse that world-view: animals.
-_-
Don't hate the player ... hate the game!
that the class action results in an award for payment of lawyer fees & $5 off their next EA game purchase.
Electronic Arts news release: due to popular demand, and the growing number of civil actions filed in this country, Electronic Arts announces a new game due to hit stores just in time for Christmas '05
commercial begins
-Johnny Cochran comes out-
EA COURTS : it's in the game!
Has anyone ever heard of a "gruntled" employee? Just wondering.
While I don't have much against a free market, this is clearly abuse. We take skilled workers, and treat them like shit. People that are great programmers, talented minds, etc. We run them through the dirt and then don't even have the common courtesy to give them overtime.
My father is a construction worker. 5 or 6 years ago, his company started pulling the same thing. He would go in at 8am, and not get home until 10pm or 11pm each night. Sometimes on Saturdays. They did, however, get overtime.
A month of this went by. People were tired. They were cranky. Accidents happened at work all the time, usually involving equipment damage or damage to whatever they were working on. They just didn't get much done in a 14 hour day.
Thankfully, the management saw what was going on and when that job was completed later that month, everyone was given a big bonus, an apology, and promises that they weren't going to set their 'completion dates' that low again.
It was depressing to watch my dad come in, after a 12 or 14 hour day, eat, shower, and go to bed, knowing that in a few hours, he'd have to be right back at work for another 12 to 14 hours. It was barely worth it in my opinion, even with overtime.
EA's shit should be a warning to other companies of what not to do.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This wonderful AC just pointed out the glaring flaw in libertarian economic theory. That the free market is the solution to all corporate ills. So basically, we're supposed to wait years or decades for a large corporation to suffer the consequences of its own bad policies for the market to finally convince it to change its ways. In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of employees and or customers are hurt because enacting faster moving regulation would be seen as "hindering" economic activity.
Absolutely WE-TODD-IT is what libertarians are.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
You can get together and unionize, and rally for better conditions. Like back in the day, when factory conditions in the US were horrible. Quitting didn't do anything. Banding together against the employers did.
It's about time we stood up as a unit. The spouse's story sounds all too familiar. For nearly three years, I worked seventy and eighty hours weeks-- several times per month at one position. I don't know if management realizes how badly this has become. I don't believe this is necessary to continue this way. One thing not mentioned in the EA spouse's letter was how difficult it is to get another job while you're in the middle of an eighty hour work week. Your options seem much more limited than the reality of the situation. Thanks again to the EA spouse and /. for getting this message out there.
From now on...I prefer contract working...If I had to go direct, I'd push for hourly pay...if you get caught in this salaried thing...they'll kill you.
I'm not a pro-union guy. They just seem to corrupt themselves, and start to operate only for their own benefit. You gotta be a good negotiator for yourself. I find that works best these days. You gotta look out for yourself, your company certainly is not.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The problem isn't (just) that EA was unfair to a lot of people in the past, it's that it continues to lie and manipulate new people into the same trap -- because as long as people ship a title before quitting, what does EA care? There are always more people who want to work there.
What EA is doing is illegal, and they are pursuing it as a deliberate and continuing policy. This isn't just a couple employees who are upset because they had a bad experience and want to win money with a lawsuit, and individual employees quitting won't change things, since that is already factored into EA's strategy.
I am the man with no sig!
true
require "something.clever";
Wrong.
At Walmart for example everyone is considered a manager which means they no longer get time and half after 40 hours a week.
Its also great since they can not fire more employee's and overwork the ones they have without penalty.
http://saveie6.com/
EA keeps bringing in new people by lying to them, and then running them into the ground.
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. Any geek gamers out there willing to boycott EA's products until they change their ways?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
So quit! --- 51%
Unionize! --- 48%
Odd... I've seen those numbers somewhere before.
--- Ban humanity.
While I am an engineer, not a programmer, I have to say that the real answer to this problem lies in the company's culture, which includes the culture of the management. As long as there are people willing to submit to this sort of treatment, it will continue, EA being a very extreme case. Here are two examples of situations that I have worked in recently to compare and contrast.
Company #1: While it was never specifically stated that the employee should put in long hours, it was common for employees to work 7:00 am-5:30pm m-f with weekend work at least every other weekend. This was with no "crunch-time" effect. The culture of the employees was simply "I work more than you do so I am a more valued employee." The odd thing about it, is it was still impossible to actually complete an improvement project, and those employees who worked long hours were more adept at creating more work for themselves than completing it. A common joke at this company was "If you are working from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm, you are only working half days." Very funny. Even funnier, this company regularly makes the fortune magazine 100 best companies to work for list. Needless to say, I am no longer with this group.
Company #2: This company's culture is "Get your work done and get out of here." Much more relaxing. The value is placed not upon how much time an employee spends at work, but on how much the employee gets done. I would feel completely secure in this position if I would work myself out of a job by automating all things possible, because the company recognizes innovation rather than time at the grindstone. The 4.5 day week is common practice, and if you have to work overtime, other employees feel honestly bad for you. The best part about it, if an exempt employee works more than 40 hours in a week, management actually insists that the employee takes comp time. I could go on and on about this, but the culture of the employees and managers is the key.
The culture of a company is a very difficult thing to change, and it gets more and more difficult to change as the number of employees increases. The best thing that an individual can do at this time is to find a company whose culture is acceptable to their work habits. If enough of the best and brightest employees find the companies with the good culture, eventually the corporate giants with bad work practices will either change or die off.
If you think that you are the best and brightest, prove that you are the brightest by changing your own situation. Not only will it help you, but it will help others in the long run.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
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.
I am the man with no sig!
The exemption that you're referring to excludes people in the entertainment industry, because it is specifically designed to cover essential workers, such as a company's IT staff, and not non-essential workers, such as someone writing the AI for a game. Besides, from what I've read it's clear that not everyone at EA earns above the magic exemption barrier.
And even if they did, requiring staff to work 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week isn't only counterproductive, it's dangerous to their long-term health: I'm sorry, but it's the 21st century, and companies shouldn't be working their employees into the ground anywhere in the world, let alone in California.
I don't care if someone is paid $10/hr or $45/hr, they still have rights, and those rights include decent, respectful working practices.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
One of the theories is people who have debt load (In the US its easy to get lots of debt) will work very very hard to keep there heads above water.
The trouble is alot of people want that bigger house or flashy car without thinking about how exactly there going to pay it off.
I'd rather have less (condo) and not have to worry about a huge mortgage/car payments. Gives you more time and freedom.
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.
Uh... they would have an incentive if they started getting sued left, right and centre.
If they were lying to employees, that would be (breaking) a verbal contract, right? (I am assuming the US allows verbal contracts, assuming they can be proven).
If one employee is lied to, they're going to have a hard time proving it. If it is happening repeatedly and systematically to many employees, the case against EA would become stronger.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"If you want to earn the big bucks be prepared to pay the price."
Except that the game dev industry doesn't really pay all that well relative to other software development jobs. Because everyone and their cousin wants to develop games. They'll burn you out like a backyard BBQ because they know they can just replace you.
And all the while they dangle the high salaries of the Top Tier Talent as the crack-laced carrot to keep you slaving away.
You'll find exceptions, but reality is quite ugly.
Just some examples:
They can put anything they want in the contract. It doesn't mean it is enforceable.
A contract I once received had all kinds of kooky stuff in it: I wasn't allowed to contact any of their "potential" clients after terminating employment. I ran that past my Lawyer and he laughed; it was patently above and beyond the bounds of any contract and thus not likely to be held up. The best comment: "They probably downloaded this contract off the Internet."
That's also why you get what you get when you sign anything without getting it vetted by your lawyer.
Yeah, right.
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.
One possible tactic would be to claim you own copyright to the code in the game, since EA broke your employment contract, or didn't pay you for work you did. Start selling copies, and force it into court on the copyright issue, and only tangentially the employment issue. These things take a while and by the time you are in court, with EA's turn over, all your co-workers will be working elsewhere, and be more willing to testify.
Where do you fucking commies come from anyway? You just seem to seep out of the woodwork whenever some story whining about bad work conditions comes up. Quit whining and find a better job!
Troll, sure. But it's a good opportunity to point out something...
It's blatant hypocrisy to support the right of companies act in their own interests (as supporters of the "free" market often do), then whine and start name-calling when employees do the same thing.
Companies acting in their own interest. Employees acting in *their* own interest. Seems like the true free-market to me.
No-one said the company owners on the receiving end had to like it; but they should take it like a man instead of screeching "Communists!" when the employee market (which is how you may care to look at it) decides to act together in its own interest.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've worked 60 and 70 hour weeks in the game industry. It was fun, challenging, and rewarding. However I wasn't working for EA and I didn't have to deal with antagonistic, lying, demanding bosses.
Within the game developer's community it is well known that EA is Evil Co. I haven't worked there but I've talked to people who have. I'm glad to see their reputation catching up with them.
I hope the class action lawsuit goes through and EA has to pay out.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
You got that right. From '93 to '98 I worked at Motorola. For some of you who don't remember, let me set the stage: the WWW was in its infancy. At the company, we had just gotten access to it, and we had Mosaic. Intranets didn't really exist yet,and I was actually on the team that helped create it in our department. (I actually got an award for it, which is kind of funny now) We were on Solaris servers, 10 users per server. So we each had "web space", and people created web pages. It was kind of cool because it was new, people were putting information out there for the whole department to use.
On my page, I had lots of work related stuff, but I also had a small collection of engineer jokes. Nothing dirty at all, just dork humor. And so it went for a few years. One day I was called into Human Resources, and my manager was there. Neither of us knew what was going on. It turned out I was being written up for using corporate resources for non work related activities. My manager stood behind me, and fought for me. He explained that my web page was internal, and that it had mostly work related things on it. There was nothing offensive on it. As it turned out, some other people in the company had discovered the intranet, and found my jokes. They were looking at them, and their supervisor got pissed because they were goofing off. So they called HR. I wasn't even informed, and asked to take the material down, and neither was my manager. I was just written up for it, and it was considered a serious infraction. All we were able to do was argue it down from a class 1 infraction to a class 2. That meant that one more infraction could result in termination. I got a little livid with the HR person, and asked her if she had ever used her email for something non-work related, even saying hi to a family member. She didn't want to answer me, and I pressed her and kept asking. She finally admitted that she had. I asked if she was going to write herself up, and my manager stepped in at that point and ended the meeting.
I left Motorola about 3 months later. There were other factors, but I have to admit that the HR interaction helped me to realize that I didn't want to be there anymore.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Somehow, I find it amazing that on a site chock-full of libertarians and liberal weenies, unionization comes up so infrequently. I know striking is difficult, but software development is a field in which it is uniquely effective: it's imperative that the same people finish a project who started it, or you waste months showing the new team the ropes. You can't just hire a bunch of scabs to stamp out code like it's steel.
Another one bites the dust
Just don't buy EA sports games. They have a marketing lock on the video game industries. Their sports games overall don't compared to Sega ESPN games in cost or quality. The only reason why Madden is a success is the 15+ years of football game monopoly. They are slipping away every year.
EA's best games coame from small-mid size company acquisitions. Electronic Arts themselves are just martketers. Like SCO is to lawyers. The real product comes some where else, and the company is just abusing the hell out of all the developers with their over-achieving marketing tactics.
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
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It's true, American work more hours and get less vacation time than other industrialized nation--two weeks less than the Japanese.
A non-scientific analysis of how fewer work hours might not be as bad for productivity as we thought can be found here. (note: this link is only authoritative for those who view interesting thing of the day as having authority).
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Uhhh, ok -- they may not be physically chained to their desks, Mr. Star-eyed Libertarian, but if they have mortgages and families and other responsibilities, then they can't quit so easily. Not in this job market.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
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.
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.
testing out my trending skills
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.
The Union's job is essentially to stop management from putting a [possibly illusory] chance of short term profit ahead of the longer term interest of the employees (and the company as a whole).
Yes and no, respectively.A union may ask for any deal that is in the interests of the membership as a whole - and many unions happily work with systems that reward performance. They may demand that the systems be fair (and avoid victimisation), or that the overall increases be good, or that no employee be too badly disadvantaged. But that's quite compatible with rewarding excellence.
Good unions won't have a problem with fair termination of bad employees. On the other hand, they may assist all their members with any appeals or due process there may be. At the end of the day, a fair process is in everyone's interest (unless you're the bad employee). In the UK that's called a "Closed Shop" and it's illegal - one of the more enlightened reforms of the Thatcher era. Unions cope just fine. A good union (especially if the employer's management is moderate to poor) will be able to attract members on its merits. Quite the reverse in some cases - I know of unions that guard their members' overtime a little too zealously. I think you miss the value of a union - at its best it provides balance, and promotes enlightened self interest and good management. Industrial relations are not supposed to be a zero-sum game!Personally, I didn't used to be a member of our union - but I joined because I thought it was doing a pretty good job.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"