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EA Reconsiders Overtime Position
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 they changed their tune and started paying developers what they're worth.
No sir. Not gonna happen. Absolutely not. I assure you.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
You're finally learning that if you treat your employees right, they won't ruin your reputation.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
This reads more like a PR stunt than anything else. Expect work conditions to be more of the same at EA. The same, constant, broken promises.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't 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 companies
In other words, we didn't want to pay overtime.
Gah. Dil-bert!
Umm in that case, hire more people
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I agree. This is likely total PR bullshit.
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.
I'm actually surprised that EA was concerned enough to even go as far as sending out a memo. Most companies that demand the hours like what's been said about EA wouldn't even go that far...
I'm almost wondering if that memo wasn't purposefully released as a PR move...
This is a perfect example of the power of press in action. This is how reporting is supposed to happen in the united states - find something wrong, and talk about it and raise such a furor over it that things get better. And since EA employs programmers and many slashdot readers are programmers, we should all keep ourselves informed.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
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?
I see this as a common problem throughout the tech industry, it just seems to be more pronounced than most at EA. The upper management creates a flawed schedule, without enough time or resources to do all of the required tasks. When it becomes apparent that the schedule will be missed, everyone goes into crunch mode, working ungodly hours to get the product out the door. The project is saved, but all of the developers have ulcers. Since the management didn't have to pay the developers for the extra hours they worked, there is not cost to the scheduling mistake, and make the same mistakes on the next project (unless they intentionally lowball the schedule, because they know they won't be the one's paying for it). If the developers received overtime, there would be a cost to the error, and it would be less likely to happen the next time.
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
This doesn't take responsibility for anything really, and it doesn't solve the problem. Sure, they can classify a 'few' positions for overtime between now and when they owe all their employees that and back OT thanks to the class action.
Whatever it takes to help them churn out the next ShaqFu.
Notice how this guy responds to the charges of whipping his employees by talking about process and efficiency? Clearly,
the only thing these employees should do is sue the bastards into the ground.
Heh. There are more appropriate measures, but they all lead to lengthy jail time.
First of all, an absolute cap at 80 hours a week under any conditions would make sense, since you are only fooling yourself if you think you are productive working even longer hours, and allow an 80 hour work week for 1 week maximum, cap it at 60 the rest of the time. If they can't meet their deliverables under these conditions, then it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that they need more staff, or have an unreasonable delivery schedule.
My rights don't need management.
"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.
Don't get me wrong - companies *do* abuse people when the company has sufficient power. Unions do provide protection to those workers, but it's not a panacea.
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
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Why is EA in the news? For the same reason Vioxx is in the news. Some lawyers are trying to get the word out in order to find members of a class action. They're also trying to gin-up hatred for the company and sympathy for the "victims" in order to cash in on a big judgement against the company.
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.
You know, sometimes things are wrong and need to be corrected. Even when lawyers are involved.
Does anyone else feel like this is still a cop-out? If I were in the position of these developers, I would be dissapointed. I'd much rather prefer working 40-60 hours a week rather than working 80 and receiving overtime. Even if they get paid overtime, their lives and families are still going to suffer because of the insane hours EA makes them work. Extra money really isn't much good if you don't have free time to enjoy it.
That said, I would gladly work 70 hours a week to be in the credits of a video game.
Exactly what EA abuses to get its employees: they hire a whole bunch of bright eyes college graduates willing to do anything to get their name in some sort of gane, then they abuse their willingness to work and burn them out. Then when they quit, EA goes back to the farm and grabs the next bunch of grads and the cycle starts again. You can't just give up your rights just for your name to appear in a game: that's the problem. The overtime thing's just something that's fallen out of the working into the ground problem because at least they realize that if they're going to be raped of their stomach lining, they'd better at least be getting paid more for it. That's close to being a step in the right direction, but in my opinion it's a red herring.
What the industry should be doing is making realistic goals for their programming team. Everyone hates release date push backs, and the reason they exist is because of these conditions. If they started making realistic goals, then the teams would be more likely to reach them and possibly surpass them than they would be to get to the old, further out goal where they have to cruch down in the month before and then end up missing it anyway. Time management and project management are much, much more important topics than the stupid overtime topic.
I thought no-overtime non-comp work was illegal for entertainment companies.
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 her own discretion and judgement" in the course of his/her work). Basically, exempt status in most states is intended to apply to management or learned professionals, not lower-level employees, but the wording is usually nebulous enough that most employers think they can apply it to most employees. Unfortunately for the company, though, the penalties for misapplying exempt status can be pretty severe. (The employees can be awarded both back pay and penalties, meaning a company like EA could potentially be out hundreds of millions of dollars.)
In the EA case, the employees in question have compared their jobs with identical jobs in other entertainment industries and found that in those other industries and within the same state (Callifornia) those same positions are not treated as exempt. These are in effect the "blue-collar" jobs at EA; the assembly-line type stuff. EA treats them as exempt under the computer-related occupation exemption, but according to that exemption you need to be "primarily engaged in intellectual or creative work that requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." (Emphasis added.) So this is actually a tough exemption to apply. You could really argue that it cannot be applied to almost anybody at a company like EA, because it's pretty likely that the look and feel of a game (and its related marketing) comes from just one or two product managers per product (who themselves brainstorm ideas with other departmental managers), with the rest of the product team simply following instructions. Even if you use your own discretion at your job some of the time, though (for example, a manager tells you to draw a character a certain way but leaves the particulars up to you), you would still not be exempt, because you are not primarily engaged in using your own discretion. You are still working with instructions provided by someone else.
I think this memo probably hurts EA's legal case. A position is either exempt or it isn't; there's no "well, we didn't think it was exempt, but now we do"... the fact is it's not up to them, it's up to the law, and if they're now deciding that the law says these positions are not exempt, then they owe all of those employees back pay and they owe the state penalties. I would imagine this memo will come up in court if no settlement is reached prior to that time.
This was intentionally leaked. No exec. writes an internal memo that long with that tone. This is an unofficial press release.
What I don't know I just fake...
That is perhaps the best way to describe this situation, and many others.
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!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I don't support mistreating workers, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to companies having positions where you work 80-hr week jobs.
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.
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
Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two, it's hardly a quest... merely a gaggle of friends wandering about. - Owl
The problem isn't overtime. The problem is not getting paid for it. If workers were constantly getting paid 1.5x for each hour over 40 a week the higher ups in EA would be fixing their scheduling and manpower shortages in a hurry. As it stands they are under no obligation to pay any more for 35 hours a week than 95 hours a week so why not squeeze as many hours as they can?
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.
I'm not too sure about your analysis. You may be right in that we have too many programmers now, although by the labor theory of value that means that the EA products aren't worth as much as they were. The labor theory of values is more prescriptive than descriptive in any case. A different perspective is needed to look at these situations.
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 issues. Furthermore I can day trade my capital from one end of the globe to another if I wish with very little disruption, but moving my labor to the next state once a year is hugely disruptive.
Discounting social impact, labor is devalued when it is moved around. If I invest my money in company A, change my mind and invest in company B a month later, and then a month later invest in company C, nobody looks askance at my capital. My buck is as green as anyone else's. If I move my labor around, things are quite different, and I probably want to hide this on my resume.
Another example is environmental impact. I can operate a gold mine, take my profits out, contaminate everything in sight with arsenic and then move my capital out before the shit hits the fan. If the net prsent value of the increased income generation I get exceeds the cost of liquidating my company, it's economically rational to do so.
Yet another example is the difference between big capital and small capital. A half million dollar business (say an auto body shop) tends to be tied to a particular location. It can't pick up and move across the world. A billion dollar business can. Walmart had a strategy that exploited this throughout the 90s. Move the big box into town, kill the mom and pops, close the store and force everybody to drive to a megabox in the next county.
States also exploit this differential when they give tax incentives to big employers. Small businesses don't get them, in effect tax burden is shifted to the guys who can't move away.
Capital needs mobility to operate efficiently. However, efficient movement of capital is not the only value in society, which is why some reasonable level of regulation is needed for labor and environmental practices.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Say, genius, how can you verify what someone says they're going to do?
Conveniently "leaked memo" my ass.
This is so obviously written with the intent to be distributed on sites such as slashdot.
The game is you write this, "leak" it out to many popular tech/biz news sites who pick it up, then the general idea is your image seems to show "you care about your employees" after all.
I will put money on the fact that 5 years from now EA's hiring/firing/burn out policies for employees with their college recruitiment EA faires and all that remain identical to how they were a month ago. This is simply a save face PR technique and I am expecting more of this convenient leaks or similiar items to show up in the next few months.
This is a classic textbook strategy straight from Political Strategies of Domestic Relations, and when your as big as EA, you use the same political strategies as goverments.
So without huge payments to lawyers, some people would be better off and some people would be worse off.
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 can deal with. If you go blind, the court can give back your sight, the can only give you money.
Since lawyers consume so much and produce nothing at all, it's not hard to argue that the people who do produce things would be better off, on average, without lawyers.
Produce nothing? They change someones behavior, and through extension society as a whole. Without lawyers, we'd be anarchy. Like it or not lawyers enforce the laws. (Yes, Kohath, the government is primaryly lawyers.)
You may think "yeah kill all the lawyers", but its a very sophmoric attitude.
Geez, I' ve got to get some work done, but this caught my eye and I just can't let this PR piece go uncommented:
...through carefully crafted PR "leaks"
...there are things we just need to fix. And the solutions dont apply to just our studios the people who market, sell, distribute and support the great games that our Studios create, all share a demanding workload.
...blah blah blah...
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
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So that guy doesn't make 100x what our worst producers do, but here's what does happen:
:)
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
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Hence, I stand by my original comment, although your head was evidently too far up your corporatist ass to understand it.
Another one bites the dust