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EA Faced With Another Employee Lawsuit
GamesIndustry.biz has the news that EA has been slapped with another employee-filed lawsuit. He's part of the engineering staff, and feels unfairly targeted by the "creative staff" laws in CA. From the article: "...in the midst of a storm of unwanted publicity about EA's employment practices, and provoked a response from the firm's vice president of human resources, Rusty Reuff, who admitted that '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.'"
Do you make $91,840? I don't think too many programmers are making 91k nowadays.
It's irrelevant whether they earn $5, $50 or $500 an hour. The point is that they agreed to work a roughly (accepting some deviation) 40 hour week for a given amount of money. And then the employer abused the exempt laws to force double or triple those hours out of them.
It's entirely valid for EA to turn around and say, "OK, we're offering $20/hour with up to 40 hours overtime at time and a half each week". The problem is, they're not. They're hiring people under one belief and then abusing the system to change the terms of their contract after it's been signed.
I'd bet no EA interview has ever gone, "OK, we'd like to put an offer on the table. $91840 a year for 80 hour weeks nine months of the year and 120 hour weeks the other three".
Yes, the employees do have the right to just up and leave. That said, changing jobs, especially in an industry that deliberately pays advance royalties in order to keep you trapped, where job seeking can take several months, etc. means taking a hit of several, if not tens of, thousands of dollars. So, no, you can't just easily leave once you realise they've screwed you.
I know I don't, it's expected that I work until the job is done.
That's all well and good, when you're doing a job. When they deliberately give you the work of two people then say "oh, you're exempt, make up the extra job's worth out of hours", it stops being about getting your job done and becomes about management abusing the exempt system to avoid hiring the staff levels they need.
A little overtime here and there, with some understanding on the odd Friday when you need to leave early is utterly different to a company that's built around the assumption that everyone will be forced to do 80 hours a week as a norm and 120 when you'd be doing 60.