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Game Industry Workers Get Voice

Posted by Zonk on

Shodan writes "eToychest writes that a new game union of sorts has been formed to both recruit new industry talent, as well as give them a unified voice when it comes to maintaining a work/life balance. PEER (Professional Electronic Entertainment Recruiters) was created to establish and maintain ethical work standards and optimum recruiting service for game industry developers, publishers, and related industry companies." From the article: "The part that catches my eye is 'ethical work standards', which I cannot help but think was established, at least in part, due to all of the fervor surrounding EA and the treatment of its employees. The group seems to be a sort of 'worker's union', as they say that in an era where quality of life and rapid growth are chief concerns, PEER gives its members 'a representative voice.'" It will be interesting to see where this leads.

8 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Ummm no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    This looks like a poor attempt at a union, if that. Infact this does not constitute a union. A union is where you pay dues and have union representation, union procedure on company property, and the government actually classifies you as a union. Its just a collective group of recruiters, not a union. It seems also this isnt an actual article Recruiters just care about cashing in on other people placement, they don't really care about the long term happiness of the employee they place.

  2. This is not a union at all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is a group of recruiters who get from 15%-30% of the first years salary as a placement fee.

  3. Recruiting company, not a union by cgenman · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't see how this is a union. PEER is a recruiting company, and all of their goals revolve around this. "advance professional external recruiting," "improve and manifest the livelihoods of the candidates seeking career growth opportunities," "develop and improve the necessary skills to achieve high performance in professional external recruiting."

    Sure, it's a recruiting company with noble goals, and if I needed a recruiter that's who I would turn to. But it is a recruiting company, not a union.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
    1. Re:Recruiting company, not a union by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      For many contracting people, the recruiter is the equivalent of a union.

      I've had people ask me to work unpaid overtime. A call to the contracting company, and it went away. I've had people ask me to do things in no way related to my job description. Again, a quick call and explanation, and it went away. I've had bosses try to hold my timesheet hostage conditional on various forms of knuckling under to idiocy. A quick call, and it gets sorted out.

      The recruiting company wants money. That means they want you happy, and they want the company happy, but they definitely want all billable hours duly accounted for. In the tech industry the very worst exploitation short of outright fraud (which I experienced without a contracting firm's umbrella helping me) that I've experienced was insistence on insane hours under lousy conditions ... it sounds silly. I'm not losing fingers in a chicken processing plant, I know, but when your health and welfare deteriorate under constant stress and overwork, it stops being silly.

      Good recruiting firms know that companies often want someone they can exploit and throw out. They are there to help.

  4. No they don't. by mad.frog · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not sure what you'd call this, but it sure ain't a union.

    More like some sort of nebulous standards body for the recruiting agencies that serve the game industry.

    And since the employer (not the employee) typically pays the recruiter's fee, color me skeptical that this is anything more than PR.

  5. Re:Unions... by Dachannien · · Score: 2, Informative

    The U.S. auto and airline industries have been in such dire straits because of their pension and health plans, which became exorbitant because of the continuous hardball played by the labor unions.

    The problem isn't the concept of the labor union, though, but rather the execution. Since unions are controlled by elected officials who serve as career union officers, they effectively have a mandate to continue to negotiate new contracts further and further in favor of the workers, even when all of the issues of safety and exploitation have long since been resolved. If they don't deliver, they don't get re-elected, and then they're out of a job.

    Ideally, the company and the union would negotiate a contract that specified an indexed annual cost-of-living adjustment and reasonable benefits, and the two could go for decades just rubber-stamping the same contract over and over again. You wouldn't need some nationwide bureaucratic organization overseeing the contract negotiations - you'd just need a few of the most well-respected guys from the shop floor to come in and make sure the company just wanted to renew the same contract. But when you have career union officers running the show, even a fair deal isn't good enough.

  6. Mod parent up by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    Right. No way is this a union. It's a trade association for headhunters. Not, incidentally, for contract-type outsourcing firms.

    What it really is, if you read their "charter", is a price-fixing scheme for headhunters. They "agree" that they should get 20% of the first year's salary, payable at hiring time.

    There's a real union for game developers - the Animation Guild, local 839, IATSE, AFL-CIO. They represent most of the animation people in Hollywood, and they're organizing game developers who are artists.

  7. Re:Is it just for the US? by malsdavis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Unions are a firm UK tradition ...just like the riots that they often cause. So there are already lots of powerful unions which UK programmers can join.

    The BECTU http://www.bectu.org.uk/ are a good one with 25,000 members, mainly media company employees though (which apparently includes Game Development). If they identify more as software engineers than game developers then there are a host of engineering unions who would accept them. Amicus http://www.amicustheunion.org/ are amongst the biggest and already have many thousands (I think) of IT employees as members.

    The TUC website http://www.tuc.org.uk/ is probably the best online resource though.