EA Served With Second 'Overtime' Lawsuit

[Chewchilla]

Looks like EA is gettin' "served" again!

OH SNAP-DIZZLE!!! :eek:

Electronic Arts served with second 'overtime' lawsuit
As in a pending complaint, EA employee seeks back pay for overtime worked.

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting a second employee is seeking damages against game publisher Electronic Arts for unpaid wages based on overtime worked.

The paper is reporting that Leander Hasty, a Culver City-based engineer on the payroll of EALA since June, 2003, filed the complaint earlier this week in Superior Court in San Mateo, CA. The paper says Hasty is seeking "undisclosed back pay, damages and penalties for himself and fellow workers."

Reportedly, Hasty's lawyers are basing their complaint on the theory that EA engineers should be eligible for overtime because they "do not perform work that is original or creative, and have no management responsibilities and are seldom allowed to use their own judgment."

The suit is at least the second legal complaint pending against the world's largest game publisher. In a similar case (http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/11/11/news_6112998.html), other EA employees are attempting to file a class-action lawsuit against EA seeking unpaid wages. In that case, filed last July 29, complainant Jamie Kirschenbaum (in Kirschenbaum vs. Electronic Arts) alleges that EA improperly classified some of its employees, including 'animators,' 'modelers,' 'texture artists,' 'lighters,' 'background effects artists,' and 'environmental artists' as exempt from overtime, and therefore failed to pay those employees overtime compensation.

The Kirschenbaum complaint seeks statutory penalties, damages, restitution, and injunctive relief. It, too, was filed in San Mateo Superior Court.

By Curt Feldman -- GameSpot
POSTED: 02/22/05 12:10 PM PST

[Deanster]

The game is tied EA 80 - Employees 80
LOL
<announcer> Employees shoot on the buzzer </announcer>
<buzzer> ERRRRRRRRRR!
<announcer> 3 POINTS EMPLOYEES WIN! EMPLOYEES GET THE MONEY, GLORY AND FAME!!!!! </announcer>
<crowd> APPLUASE </crowd>

[Darksol]

Lawsuit just settled
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/051005/55736.html
EA pays out 15.6 million a fraction of what they earned by engaging in bad behavior.
See a trend here folks. Do the crime, then pay the fine, a small fraction of what you made on their time! Bwahaahahaha!

[Shane R. Monroe]

Damn, that's pretty DAMN SAD. Its true. Just like dumping toxic waste. Cheaper to pay the fine than properly handle it.

[esteban]

Man, is it a pipedream to hope that IT professionals will organize and form union(s) over the next decade? Unionization efforts in the IT industry have not met with much success thus far (the usual union-busting tactics + assorted other reasons), though WashTech seems to be keeping the spirit alive...

TANGENT: I'm sure folks have written about this, but I haven't read anyting on it (share links / articles if you know of any): If anyone in the IT industry will be unionizing, it might be the IT workers overseas who do it first... though it would vary by region depending on how well organized labor was doing, in general, among other things.

[nukinetix]

Guys, everywhere I've worked in the games industry it's ALWAYS been like this -- overtime (unpaid mostly) is a fact of life for us, game developers ! I assure you it's not just EA. You want unions .. tell that to my good friend who rents a tiny tiny room (no mortgage to pay, just a little rent, thus minimising his expenses), lives on junk food (and 2 days of the week the company freely distributes that every time the team has to work REALLY late), has no home PC and effectively LIVES in the office - he works , loves what he does, and gets a decent geeky place to effectively live in, for free.

I am not kidding.

[ArcadeNut]

Man, is it a pipedream to hope that IT professionals will organize and form union(s) over the next decade? Unionization efforts in the IT industry have not met with much success thus far (the usual union-busting tactics + assorted other reasons), though WashTech seems to be keeping the spirit alive...

TANGENT: I'm sure folks have written about this, but I haven't read anyting on it (share links / articles if you know of any): If anyone in the IT industry will be unionizing, it might be the IT workers overseas who do it first... though it would vary by region depending on how well organized labor was doing, in general, among other things.

Unions are just as bad as some companies. I personally would never join a Uniion. They do have their place, but the IT industry is not that place. The power that we should yield (which most do not) is that fact that we have the knowledge and skills to make things work.

Unions are effective in things like Auto Workers because you can be replaced in the blink of an eye. I can take pretty much any person off the street and train them how to insert TAB A into SLOT B and have them up and running in a couple days.

The majority of people cannot be taken off the street and taught how to manage DNS, DHCP, Email, SQL Server, etc... Hell it's hard to find people good enough to deal with all that who have been in the IT industry for a long time.

Unions are also effective in things like Airlines because it's such a narrow employment market. You have very little choices in where you can go. It's not like you can quit your job and start your own major airline.

In those cases I think Unions are very effective. I don't see it being very effective with IT because the jobs require skills that the average person doesn't have and IT is a very broad market.

[Shane R. Monroe]

If you want to be like Flynn from TRON and program Space Paranoids on your off time, that's cool. If you want to put in extra time so your project doesn't suck - that's admirable and cool too.

However, that EA is doing is -apparently- illegal. If you sign up with EA and they tell you - expect an 80 hour work week for $x pay, then its YOUR fault and you agreed to it.

I seriously doubt, though, that any of these people agreed on paper to this sort of thing.

Remember, just because WE are devoted individuals with a raw passion doesn't mean that other people want to do their little 1/26th of some new game for 80 hours a week.

[nukinetix]

Of course it's illegal. And of course almost every single company in the games industry does it.

The small dev studios do it because they have to, in order to survive (seriously there's nothing worse than missing a milestone twice, not being paid by the publisher and subsequently not being able to pay salaries and having to close doors and declare bankruptcy - it happened to over a dozen MAJOR game devs in the UK within a span of 12 months!!).

EA and the other similar behemoths do it because they can - that's how it goes. Sue them, they will pay the price, they don't care. They hire 20 something year olds who are dying to work on a major console game and are willing to work 24 hours a day twice a week and 16 hours for the remaining 5 days (no kidding) ... until they burn out and/or get fed up with the treatment (that's when they get into their 30s) and start complaining, which is cool because that means it's time to replace them with more fresh blood.

I mean really what are they going to do, sue EA? Ok, go ahead, you may get rich even (I still don't know what the spouse of that famous spouse got after suing!) but nothing is going to change. In fact, now with the XBox360 and PS3 development cycles, oh man ... God show mercy is all I have to say!

It's very sad, I know. It's tragic, but there you have it.

In a way, only Nintendo can help this, indirectly ... GBA projects were quite a lot less stressful and demanding (I remember way back, 2 years ago, we're talking about 6 month cycles, 4-5 people per project max, minimum overtime -- it was cool) and the DS should be similar, only slightly worse. The revolution might be ok too, we'll see.

p.s. Game development is not IT in my opinion .. there is some overlap , and technically speaking it is of course, but it's so SO different, there's really no comparison if you ask me.