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Activision Sued For Unpaid Overtime
In the wake of EA's employee settlement, Activision finds itself in a suit for much the same reason. Next Generation reports: "Activision's Computer Graphics employees, who work many overtime hours to produce Activision's profitable videogames, fully deserve to be paid all the overtime compensation to which they are entitled under the law ... Excessive overtime is endemic in the videogame industry, but we hope that this and other lawsuits will spur major changes in the way employers treat their employees."
The entire notion of unpaid overtime is complete bollocks.
It's bad for the employee, since they can be taken advantage of.
It's bad for the company, since it provides a method to ameilorate poor planning by providing unpaid labour, thus badly weakening one of the main incentives to plan properly - COST.
Companies like unpaid overtime in the same way drug addicts like their fix; it feels good ("phew, project saved!") which in fact being terribly harmful.
As for changing the attitude of employers, it's not likely to happen. Employers enjoy getting as much work for as little outlay as they can, and once they burn people out they feel no qualms about getting rid of "the deadweight".
... a titanic intellect in a world of icebergs...
If you are in a salaried position then you don't get overtime. Period. If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months. The other side of this coin is getting better control of your time off (short and long term). If you don't like this then take an hourly position, duh.
This simply isn't true across the board. In the city I live in, a salaried woman sued her employer for a crapload of unpaid overtime and won. Even though her contract specified she would not get paid for OT, she won the case.
Normally, if you signed such a contract, it would be under the assumption that overtime would be infrequent. Employers then take advantage of you and work you 9 hours a day if they like.
Score one for the working stiff!
Except that in our industry, the only hourly positions are contract jobs. It would be quite amusing to see the big names fall like dominos if all the good guys did turn contractor overnight, and suddenly charge what they were actually worth to the company rather than what was offered when they signed up, but for now, the "market forces" make this unlikely.
That doesn't mean that the practice of saying someone's on salary and so should work unlimited hours is ethical. Indeed, many countries have laws that outright ban the practice, because the only people who think it's a good idea are incompetent managers.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months.
The lesson here is not to take any such contracts that lack provisions for any kind of project overrun.
If the requirements change halfway through the project, and it throws schedules off to the point where it's going to take 24 months to finish it instead of 18, or will require me to work 70-hour weeks instead of 40-50 hour weeks, I will require additional compensation, and my employer is going to be aware of that from the outset.
In some places it's nearly impossible to work hourly in the tech field. The real problem with unpaid overtime with salaried employees is that it generates abuse. A project sets an arbitrary deadline that can't be met. Tech-worker joe never saw the plan, never could contest the estimates, never sees a proper scope set for the work to be done; scope creaps, estimates are ignored and the plan is thrown out the window. But that's ok, everyone will work 60 hours a day for 2 weeks so a Project Manager can hit his bonus.
It's not fair, it's not right but it is legal and it really sucks for those folks who have an aptitude in this field.
Oh and don't get me started on how this is keeps new jobs from being formed because so many people are getting overworked.
Oops, how did this get here?
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The law - and the courts - have said otherwise. Abusive contract provisions are not enforceable, and are routinely struck down in cases like this.
There is a difference between salaried and salaried exempt, after all. Were you aware of this?
As a general rule (and it varies somewhat by state, though the feds set minimum standards), to be salaried exempt (without the exempt, you are very explicitly entitles to overtime), you must be one of the following:
1) A regulated professional (as in, your profession is regulated by some government agency as to your competence).
2) A manager - that means you must have subordinates, and you must spend at least half your time supervising them (among other restrictions).
3) An executive - which means you get very broad discretion in how you do your job.
4) A computer professional (who meets specific criteria in the labor code) who makes a minimum amount per week (which varies rather a lot by state (in California, for example, the minimum is the equivalent of $47.81 per hour, or nearly $100,000 a year).
If you meet one of those criteria, you may legally be salaried exempt. Otherwise, regardless of what your contract says, you may not legally be classsified as salaried exempt.
Of course, all this applies only to employees. What I would expect Activision to claim is that these folks are contract labor, but that can get mighty complicated, too. Microsoft got hit a few years ago on the same thing, and lost, despite what they thought were bulletproof contracts.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Activision is paying taxes for these people, which will definitely make them employees, not contractors.
(I am not a lawyer, and laws vary by state. If this matters to you, you'd have to be an idiot to not consult a qualified labor attorney local to you.)
Yet the corps still dont get it.
The accountants are still looking at squeezing the maximum amount of productivity for the least possible cost. This means making one man do the work for two for the same price.
What they forget is that after 50 hours you get less and less work and when you approach 60 hours you get negative return.
Coding is hard and error prone. You will only spend more hours debugging the code then implementing it properly by having sane hours.
Also productivity does suffer as enough GOOD employees who actually do the work of 2 men because they are tallented quit. THis makes only the bad employees and newbies stay on which lengthens your projects longer.
Most poor managers know this and jsut ship the products with bugs or look at India.
http://saveie6.com/
The whole notion about being salaried is that you will not receive overtime pay. If you are an "exempt employee" the notion of overtime means absolutely nothing. People should know this going into jobs and be ready for it. Most jobs I have applied for as an Electrical Engineer make it quite clear that overtime is not given and that you may be required to work 50 or 60 hr weeks.
Many applications for these same jobs often ask how many hours per week you are willing to work; this is presumably used to weed out people who are totally unwilling to work overtime. My father was a salaried employee for the better part of his 20 yrs with his company and never earned OT. He was gone to work before I ever got up at 6am and wasn't home until 5pm. Did he ever complain about the long hours or lack of OT? Nope. The next thing you know these people will be unionizing (if they haven't tried already), and I will not get into my view on unions. This is absurd. The only reason people ever win these suits is because a group of 12 citizens, most of whom are probably hourly, will be like..."I get OT, don't they?" I wonder how many of these complaints are by people in their first or second jobs. It wouldn't surprise me if it was mostly those.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Programmers are not exempt either, unless they are direct managers, and spend some of their time actually managing people. Or they make a large enough salary to begin with (which is about 100k+).
In fact, ONLY managers, supervisors, & execs are truly OT exempt employees. Corporate America sure as hell doesn't want their employees knowing that fact.
My last company actually changed all of us from salaried to hourly for this very reason. Even though we had no real overtime qualms, they didn't work us like dogs. They claimed that it was now not "legal to make a non-manager salaried", which was an obvious lie, as what they meant to say was "we can no longer skip paying you overtime because you're not a manager". So, everyone went hourly, and a sudden OT ban went into effect. I'm guessing somebody ratted them out to the state board.
Walmart? Your kidding?
You may want to google them and use the term unethical when your bored. Walmart is also using imminent domain laws and lobbying to create new super centers. That means Walmart is just taking land away from people.
Also their headquarters was upgraded courtesy of our tax dollars of course costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Disgusting isn't it?
http://saveie6.com/
To qualify for the learned professional employee exemption, all of the following tests must be met:
* The employee must be compensated on a salary or fee basis (as defined in the regulations) at a rate not less than $455 per week
* The employee's primary duty must be the performance of work requiring advanced knowledge, defined as work which is predominantly intellectual in character and which includes work requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment
* The advanced knowledge must be in a field of science or learning
* The advanced knowledge must be customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.
Straight from the source of US Labor laws. Now some states will have different and varying rules. But that nice broad definition covers almost anyone with a higher degree who is paid on a Salary. This almost certainly covers engineers and computer scientists.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I ain't seeing it, is there a website to look at? Some GPS coordinates?
..well.. rank assholes. Nice employers with a fair and honest system in place are the exception, not the rule anymore, because they can get away with it. remember Wallstreet, the movie "Greed...is good!" that is their motto and how they do things now. if it means the CEO makes an extra 50 million-that is what happens. if it means the company gradually goes down the tubes-they don't care, they are in in for what they can loot-short term profit mentality.
How many times do you have to quit a job and move maybe and get another job, etc, before you notice that most employers today are
We don't have a moderation system for employers in this nation, nothing official anyway, and most states are "right to fire you because we are assholes" rule.. The government rarely forces a corporation to just cease business, no matter what things they pull or how many people they screw over. The government gives *tax breaks* for corporations to move their labor overseas, this is free trade..how? The government lets corporations publish completely bogus job help-wanted specs that no human could hope to fill-purely as a paperwork compliance scam, so they can import cheaper white collar labor under the HB-x rules. This is free trade-how? Anything that isn't white collar they have for years allowed unlimited massive waves of illegals in to dilute the labor pool and drop down wages-this is "free trade"-how? And corporations can and do act as cartels, and also have the large chunks of cash money *bribes* that they use to pay for legislation. Yes, bribes, no other word for it, bribes. How is joe little guy supposed to come up with 50 grand apiece per representative and senator to "lobby" for this or that law that might make his labor "free trade" more effective and "profitable"? And heavens forbid people want to unionize so they might have an equal footing with management, goes against "free trade" rulezz somehow, you are supposed to "negotiate" against a billion dollar corporation which has an illegal immigrant or a foreign worker at 1/10th the going rate to "negotiate back" against you. Free trade?? It doesn't exist. Scam trade, corrupt plutocracy and high level collaboration to destroy the US middle class worker is the system in place now. They want two classes of humans, worker drones so desparate they will take any job at any wage and have a dismal living situation-then the bosses and owners. That's reality now, that's what the 'free trade" globalists want, not some fantasy "free trade" bullshit where your individual labor is somehow "equal" to the power and influence a billion dollar transnational corporation has.
Want to see the proof? In a very few words, and this is near universal now, about every company out there. You are a "human resource", like the copier or a mop or a ton of coal. That's it, you have lost your personhood, your humanity, you are no longer part of the "person-ell", you are a "resource" and resources are by definition "exploited".
The only "free trade" is the big companies are "free" to trade us around. This is called slavery in the old days, now all they do is tie into a phony credit/money/debtors prisoner-in-place scam, you are "paid" to go into debt forever, you can never pay it off, you have so called personal debt and "national" debt. Try to pay it ALL off, go ahead, try. They will never let you do it. Look at your car, you don't have title, you have certificate of title, the state owns the title. Same with your home unless you are one of the very fortunate and lucky ones to have a land patent. they own the house-that's why they can tax you on it forever. Make you pay rent.
It's modern gussified up slavery, that's all. You are "free" to quit asshole company A to go work for asshole company B, c, D or E. What a good deal! Wait you say, just quit all of them and go move to the woods? Sorry, that is "illegal", you can get arrested if they feel like it for being pennil
$455/wk is a decent wage where I live, and I doubt many programmers make less. Duty #2 pretty much exactly sums up the job of your average programmer.
...here's an idea for a flexible regulation:
Nobody in a company may work more hours per week than either the manager to whom they directly-report. Developers wouldn't be permitted to work longer than their manager, their manager couldn't work longer than their director, their director couldn't work longer than their VP, and their VP couldn't work longer than their President/CEO, etc..
That way, how hard the company works depends entirely on how hard the top-level management -- which is already paid hundreds of times more than the lower-level employees (and for skills which are not nearly as rare as they would have us believe, nor for performance that is often in any way competent or worthy of the pay). It would ensure that those who are most highly-paid are also the ones working the longest hours.
It makes sense organizationally too (since virtually-all businesses have a top-down, hierarchical organizational structure -- just like the any socialist government): if there is work to be done, then the people doing the work need to be guided by management (just as if you have a couple threads running in a multithreaded app, you need a thread manager to ensure they play nicely).
I'm sure some of my libertarian fans will mod me down "-1, Commie". But let's face it: the alternative is what? Contract disputes in court? For over 100 years, contract law hasn't the absolutist teeth that libertarians want to have enforced. Would it work if we did? Maybe -- and it's a nice ideal in any case.
But such an ideal is not reality, and as the conservative writer Thomas Sowell likes to say, "reality is not optional."
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?