Slashdot Mirror
EA Spouse Outed
patio11 writes "EA Spouse, who sparked a revolution (or, at least, a wave of lawsuits and promises for improvement) in the game development industry with a blog post decrying labor practices at Electronics Arts, was outed as Erin Hoffman in a Mercury News article. She and then-fiance, now-husband Leander Hasty were plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits against EA and continue to develop games and be activists for better working conditions for game developers." From the article: "More than a year later, game developers have won settlements in three class-action lawsuits alleging EA created exhausting work schedules without paying overtime and successfully pressed employers to ease unrelenting workloads. And EA Spouse, whose true identity has been cloaked until now, is becoming a voice against America's culture of overwork."
When I was working at Atari, the QA supervisors would tell the testers that if they didn't like their work conditions, they can go work for Taco Bell down the street. They stopped saying that when it became obvious that Taco Bell does have better working conditions at a slightly higher pay rate that some of the entry-level testers were making. They started losing senior people when Sony was paying $20/hr instead of $16/hr. Go figure.
Yeah, except that Europeans tend to be more productive per hour than Americans.
Really? According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US has a GDP of $12,410,000,000,000, compared to Europe's $12,180,000,000,000 (all figures in US dollars). Contrast that with Europe's population of 456,953,258 against the US's 298,444,215. That gives the us a per capital product of $41,582.31 against Europe's $26,654.81. So far it looks like the US is more productive.
Let's look closer. The European Union has a labor force of 218,500,000, compared to the US's 149,300,000. Leaving out the unemployment rates for each group (9.4% vs. 5.1%), we're left with 197,961,000 workers in Europe compared to 141,685,700 in the US. We'll leave that for a moment.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek, which sites a spreadsheet from OECD, workers in the US work an average of 1777 hours per year. Taking the average of the EU member states (the spreadsheet only lists individual countries), we get 1576.33 hours per year.
So, the US has a total of 251,775,488,900 work-hours per year, giving an average of $49.29 gross product per work hour. Europe has 312,051,863,130 work-hours per year, giving an average of $39.03 per work hour.
I'm sorry, who's more productive did you say?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.