EA Spouse Posts Plans for Watchdog Organ

Jaero writes "The Spouse has a followup post to her "EA: The Human Story" from over a month ago. Not only was it nominated for a Best Software Essay of 2004, but she has revealed plans to start an independent industry watchdog organization called GameWatch.org, meant to monitor the quality of life in the game development world. Anyone will be able to post their story, as well as design the logo (a contest which lasts until January 15th)."

Union Now

[fishdan]

As discussed elsewhere EA sports has an exclusive deal [sportsdot.org] with the NFL and the NFLPA. I expect them to allow more reasonable hours for their developers, because they will be able to turn out an inferior product without competition. Gamewatch, when it comes to pass, is a charming idea, but unions are coming [washtech.org] to the IT field. Regretably mean unscrupulous businessmen are taking advantage of nice developers with scruples. And most developers have listened to RMS at some point in time and have some of that altruism in them. Which means they need an organization to defend them. Union is the right thing to do. Can you imagine an organized strike of IT workers?

Re:Union Now

[remosain]

newsflash! I don't know about rock stars, but artist have a union ... SAG http://www.sag.org/ [sag.org] They are all workers after all

Re:Union Now

[charlieOReilly]

Agreed. I believe those developers who are not confident in their abilities would want such a safety net, but this will do nothing but make those in the union less and less competitive. The best developers don't want to be a part of the herd, they want to distinguish themselves from it through outstanding performance. The union mentality will act counter to this. As suggested in Graham's essay, "Hackers and Painters" we developers are makers. By turning our profession into more of an assembly line type of job we are hurting our professional chances by taking away the only positive elements that distinguish ourselves from the overseas competition, mainly, intelligent creativity.

A problem is with unions in general

[brucmack]

This whole EA thing is really indicative of a larger problem... unions in North America.

I grew up in Canada, with a father in management at a public utility. I heard endless complaints about the union workers at said utility... how they were overpaid and underworked, but there wasn't anything management could do about it, or there would be a strike.

Then I went to work in Europe, and lo and behold, almost everyone is in a union. Furthermore, the union workers are not abusing their powers. Instead, the unions help their members get jobs and training, with contract negotiation basically a secondary function. It simply isn't needed, because companies tend to be fair in the first place. The unions publish wage statistics that companies are expected to follow, and they do.

It seems that in North America, unionized workers are the ones that need it the least, while companies like Wal*Mart and EA do whatever they want to their employees. There's this attitude of management to care only about the bottom line and not about the workers, while at the same time, unions are all about grabbing more and more for their members (see the current labour situation in the NHL).

I hope that at some point the system can change, but it's a long way off.

Cut The Fat.......

[Bluesy21]

OK, forget the game industry for a minute and look at all industries. All industries seem to be purely focused on the bottom line. Not that most of them take it to the extent that EA seems to have.
Virtually everywhere we see people making less, their jobs getting outsourced, or employees be laid off. However, the income gap between the bottoms rungs of an organization and the top level has been skyrocketing across all industries. It's time for all workers to have a little more respect for themselves.
I'm not talking about people have jobs where they don't do anything all day and never have to work late, but companies should stop taking more from their employees every year than they give them. More and more it seems the trend were employees get a raise less than the inflation rate and they are expected to essentially take a pay cut and then pay more for health care and get less benefits. IMO there doesn't seem to be an end for this trend but I guess we can all hope.