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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 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.)
Dammit!, you're absolutley right. These commie weasels should stop their whimpering. As any red-blooded American knows, corporations know what's best and if left too much free time these marxist programmers might try writing some of that damned open source software which is a plot to undermine the stability of Corporate America and western democracy. And unions! Just think how much stronger and more free America and the world would be if those good for nothing unions stayed out the good old U.S. of A! So many trillions down the toilet. Without their interference, the average american family would have at least four cars and a tv in every room. If these tofu eaters think they can get away with that in my country, they're going to get a real rude awakening.
You're totally missing the issue. The workweek is 40 hours. By law. Unless you happen to fall into certain professions. Software programmers do not. And frankly, 6:00am to 5:00pm is laughable compared to the workweeks I worked in the game industry. Try 8am to midnight. (Or if you prefer, 9am till 1-2 in the morning). Try not having a day off (including weekends) for 6 straight months. There are 168 hours in a week. I've worked 112 of them.
We're not talking about a little 'wink wink' 'nudge nudge' "overtime" at the end of the project for two months to get it done. We're talking about the kind of hours that cause game industry employees to have a nearly 70% divorce rate. We're talking about 'gee I haven't seen my kids in 4 years' kind of hours. We're talking about crunches for over a year.
Virtually every project is going to have some kind of push at the end to get all the lose ends tied down. But we're not talking about a little push, we're talking about a jackhammer.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
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.
Wow. That's a vacation.
I interviewed at a place once (I won't name names... Ok, Atari) that had checked with their lawyer to make sure it was OK to require all employees to stay a MINIMUM of 60 hours every week (not including lunch) as a routine part of employment. If you fell under 60 hours, you were fired. Even assuming your father's commute was instantaneous and he never took a lunch, he still would have been fired from Atari for underperforming. And this was minimum... most people were expected to stay longer.
I was hired on a company once to help finish a project. It was supposed to be a one-month job, but lasted for half of a year. During that time, I never worked less than 60 hours a week, and never saw both days of a weekend. My real average was in the mid 70's. for... six... loooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... oooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... ooooooooooooong.... months.
One of my friends in the industry (whom I actually met on that job) has been crunching for most of the past year. I've only managed to see him once in this entire time, and only then I incidentally bumped into him while driving home.
And these are independent companies. Big studios are notoriously worse. At least my crunch time ended after 6 months, and my friend's is within a realistic month or two of ending. At a studio like EA or Activision, they shuttle people around as they are needed for projects. And they're needed for projects as crunch time kicks in. Employees / slaves call it "permacrunch" or "crunchopping", the act of being bounced from one paniced 70 hour a week team to another paniced 70 hour a week position permanently for the rest of your life.
Now remember that you take about a 50% pay cut below market rates to work in the game industry, and some of these companies are highly profitable, and you can see where the dissatisfaction arises.
I hope we unionize. It was union labors that ensured for example that electrical engineers wouldn't have to abandon their families to work 70 hours a week every week for low pay no healthcare and and zero security.
And if you don't know how bad it is in the gaming industry... do a little research before you judge us. We're not grocery store clerks that want healthcare, or graduate students lobbying for better pay. We're one of the last great slaveries in the so-called free market. And we deserve to be treated like human beings.
The ______ Agenda
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
...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?