Tuesday, May 13, 2008
"What these employees are facing is totally a microcosm of the large structural trends that are impacting employees across the economy," says Marcus Courtney, organizer for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. "Employees are working more hours. They're getting compensated less. And the power of employers is increasing compared to the power of employees. Compared to other countries, U.S. workers work longer hours. Corporate profits are up, and wages are continuing to stagnate even though we're more than three years into an economic recovery."
Courtney adds, "What's really unique about this is that these are highly skilled, highly educated workers who are facing these issues, who in the past would have been insulated from these broader structural changes."
The Electronic Arts class action suit and the online fracas have sparked calls for a holiday boycott of the company's products, some talk of unionization, and even an appeal for more humane treatment of employees from an industry association of developers. It's also set off a flurry of news articles with headlines like "For Developers, It's Not All Fun and Games" and "When Long Hours at a Video Game Stop Being Fun." The official response from Electronic Arts has been tepid, little more than a statement that it offers workers competitive salaries and benefits.
Yet, while winning back pay may be possible in the courts, what these game makers really seem to want -- a life -- may prove to be more elusive. "California law does not prevent people from having to work 100 hours in a week," says Courtney. In other words, you can't just sue your way to a more reasonable work schedule. "They're not going to change company practices in terms of excessive work hours," he says. "The only thing a court case might be able to do is get them compensation, and that's not even a guarantee."
The woman behind the pseudonym EA Spouse has received so many hundreds of sympathetic e-mails in response to her essay that she has all but given up trying to respond to every single one individually. Still, she says that even so, she's not terribly optimistic that the company or the industry will change, in part because of the attitudes of the very developers most affected.
"First, a lot of them still haven't even accepted that it's a problem, and they cause a lot of grief to those who actually want to have families or social lives and still work in the industry that they love. Second, the 'cowboy' mentality that's been discussed seems to put this idea in developers' heads that they need to be these existential heroes and sacrifice themselves for the good of video games everywhere. The corporations feed off of these mentalities and use them to exploit people," she writes in an e-mail.
"I don't see them altering their basic mentality to suck developers dry. The developers themselves will have to take a stand. It would be nice if that stand could be taken without involving lawyers or unions, but increasingly it seems that that won't be possible."
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