Long live EA!

[hardrock 1]

Quote[/b] ]My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse.

EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?

I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.

Our adventures with Electronic Arts began less than a year ago. The small game studio that my partner worked for collapsed as a result of foul play on the part of a big publisher -- another common story. Electronic Arts offered a job, the salary was right and the benefits were good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the interviews: "how do you feel about working long hours?" It's just a part of the game industry -- few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifics about what "working long hours" meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question; now we know why.

Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.

Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.

Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.

The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.

And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it. Comp time is a staple in this industry, but EA as a corporation wishes to "minimize" this reprieve. One would think that the proper way to minimize comp time is to avoid crunch, but this brutal crunch has been on for months, and nary a whisper about any compensation leave, nor indeed of any end of this treatment.

This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it. The love of my life comes home late at night complaining of a headache that will not go away and a chronically upset stomach, and my happy supportive smile is running out.

No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do. No one on that team is interested in producing an inferior product. My heart bleeds for this team precisely BECAUSE they are brilliant, talented individuals out to create something great. They are and were more than willing to work hard for the success of the title. But that good will has only been met with abuse. Amazingly, Electronic Arts was listed #91 on Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2003.

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.

But can they?

The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)

To put some of this in perspective, I myself consider some figures. If EA truly believes that it needs to push its employees this hard -- I actually believe that they don't, and that it is a skewed operations perspective alone that results in the severity of their crunching, coupled with a certain expected amount of the inefficiency involved in running an enterprise as large as theirs -- the solution therefore should be to hire more engineers, or artists, or designers, as the case may be. Never should it be an option to punish one's workforce with ninety hour weeks; in any other industry the company in question would find itself sued out of business so fast its stock wouldn't even have time to tank. In its first weekend, Madden 2005 grossed $65 million. EA's annual revenue is approximately $2.5 billion. This company is not strapped for cash; their labor practices are inexcusable.

The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.

I look at our situation and I ask 'us': why do you stay? And the answer is that in all likelihood we won't; and in all likelihood if we had known that this would be the result of working for EA, we would have stayed far away in the first place. But all along the way there were deceptions, there were promises, there were assurances -- there was a big fancy office building with an expensive fish tank -- all of which in the end look like an elaborate scheme to keep a crop of employees on the project just long enough to get it shipped. And then if they need to, they hire in a new batch, fresh and ready to hear more promises that will not be kept; EA's turnover rate in engineering is approximately 50%. This is how EA works. So now we know, now we can move on, right? That seems to be what happens to everyone else. But it's not enough. Because in the end, regardless of what happens with our particular situation, this kind of "business" isn't right, and people need to know about it, which is why I write this today.

If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Right?

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

Shocking that they can get away with it. I think I'll avoid to buy any EA products in the future. Well, I did in the past so it shouldn't be too hard.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Well, that certainly explains how they can pump out so many games in such a short space off time.

The real shame is that these people are working themselves to death to make what is ultimately crap; nothing new or revolutionary that would otherwise warrent such 'dedication' from EA's staff. They're paying peanuts and we're getting nutty monkey shit.

[hellfish6 7]

Wow.. I was actually thinking of working for them down the line.

[bn880 5]

Maximizing profits, they could hire 1.5x the personnel and help the unemployment rate, but that cuts into profits.

General problem with Straight Capitalism without intervention/regulations on work hours and work sharing.

[Hit_Sqd_Maximus 0]

Maximizing profits, they could hire 1.5x the personnel and help the unemployment rate, but that cuts into profits.

Actually, hiring 2 people @ 40 hours a week would be cheaper than hiring one person @ 80 hours a week...

[denoir 0]

Ah, but hiring a person @ 40 hours and get him to without additional compensation work for 80 hours is still cheaper.

Anwyay, I wouldn't blame EA, they're just playing the game as it should be played. Their priority is maximizing their profit.

That's where labour laws etc come in.

[walker 0]

Hi all

The main problem with that is you burn out staff. Your key asset in Game making is the things that go up and down in the lifts.

Of course you can keep doing it by having a high staff turn over and accepting the cost of having to bring together a new staff each time.

In the end though you are taking a big risk all it takes is for the staff situaltion to go tits up before the project ends, half the staff leave, and all of a sudden and your big project is lost; along with all the cash invested and and your rep.

If it happens twice and a game developer follows all the other game companies that made the same error. That said you can just set up a bunch of EAs and run them from a seperate organisation an EMI type publisher or what ever and you can just whore the brand when it starts to go tits up turning out buggy sh*te and remakes; while grooming some new glossy hit maker of a development team. It is a bit like how the music indutry works

Then there are the companies that take the different aproach and try to maintain their developers in the hope of a long period of many hits, a lot of the good japanese companies do this and turn out hit after hit.

Not suprised to hear EA work that way they tend to treat their customers the same way: When I wanted to report bugs in Ghost Recon I got given the run arround my posts on the forum got deleted as being off topic? They said they never recieved the emails, they claimed the bug didnt exist etc.

Eventualy they came out with a post saying that GR wouldnt run on the graphic processor I had despite their box saying it did. They never fixed the bug. and they lost all the other people like me who had the same bug.

Sad to hear how they work but hey if your working on a bad project with EA, or any other developer just leave, go find a job in the city working for a bank it is more secure and pays better, so stuff em.

Kind Regards Walker

[Baphomet 0]

I was considering posting this very link as well...

It makes me think even more that BIS should be entitled to take all the time they need to make OFP 2. As it seems to me that the end result will be the work of people who truly want to make a quality product. Not just churn out some binary garbage because they're running under a tight deadline.

I think both the consumer and the developer would be better for it in the end. What they're doing at EA doesn't seem right to me.

Read through some of the replies on that post. Some of it's just disgusting, if they are in fact truthful accounts of what goes on at EA.

Besides. They published the battlefield series, and ghost recon. Enough said.

[feersum.endjinn 6]

I think both the consumer and the developer would be better for it in the end. What they're doing at EA doesn't seem right to me.

Read through some of the replies on that post. Some of it's just disgusting, if they are in fact truthful accounts of what goes on at EA.

Besides. They published the battlefield series, and ghost recon. Enough said.

EA publishes a lot of sports games. Valve might delay product a year and it's still Half-Life 2, but you can't release NHL 2005 in 2006 (well, this year you could but I digress... ) Also, it seems to be case is that what they are doing is perfectly legal in California, software programmers are considered "professionals" and if they have salaries over some limit, they are exempt from overtime laws. So they are working on a monthly salary, it's same pay whether they work 1 or 100 hours a week - guess which one your employer wants.

Also, Ghost Recon was published by Ubi Soft.

[red oct 2]

i never would have guessed EA would have been such slave drivers. i worked w/ a construction crew that was out of town and would usually do 12 hours at most 6 days a week, but they were payed extremely well (over time and as well as a little bonus to cover hotel expense's) and got full medical coverage.

[hellfish6 7]

Construction workers can make a ton of money. As I understood it in Illinois, you'd work 12 hours/6 days a week in summer and then have winter off. You'd make $70,000 easy during the summer and could live off your savings the rest of the year.

[billybob2002 0]

EA...a love and hate relationship. I bought the Medal of Honor: War Chest and had a defective cd. So, I emailed customer service and they gave me some tips that did not work. I emailed them back and said they did not work. The response from them was warranty and they rushed to put the price of replacement in the email. I had this game was for less than week and so, I noticed in the fine print in the back of manual, the replacement was free. However, I had to pay close to $10 for shipping to a P.O. Box in CA through regular mail.... The game turned from $29.99 (more like 30-something with tax) to $39.99 (more like 40-something). Damn you Target for not letting me return it!!!

On a side note to compare with Nintendo Customer Service/Warranty: I had a defective Gamecube and the replacement was free including shipping (Fed-Ex). Also, the box was free. It made me happy..

[billybob2002 0]

Well, that certainly explains how they can pump out so many games in such a short space off time.

The real shame is that these people are working themselves to death to make what is ultimately crap; nothing new or revolutionary that would otherwise warrent such 'dedication' from EA's staff. They're paying peanuts and we're getting nutty monkey shit.

HA..Goldeneye: Rogue Agent... A very average FPS that tries to use its title to reminds us about that other Goldenye... At least the rental was free...love that Blockbuster Game Pass...

[pajama 0]

Last game I bought from EA is Tiger Wood's PGA Tour 2004 (PC), which is way diffrent from the consol versions

[shinRaiden 0]

NY Times Business Section, Nov. 21, 2004.

Quote[/b] ]

CHARLES DICKENS himself would shudder, I should think, were he to see the way young adults are put to work in one semimodern corner of our economy. Gas lamps are long gone, and the air is free of soot. But you can't look at a place like Electronic Arts, the world's largest developer of entertainment software, and not think back to the early industrial age when a youthful work force was kept fully occupied during all waking hours to enrich a few elders.

If you please Mr. Scrooge, at this Holiday season... a little dividend for the class-action filing solicitors?

Quote[/b] ]

Games for video consoles and PC's have become a $7 billion-a-year business. Based in Redwood City, Calif., Electronic Arts is the home of the game franchises for N.F.L. football, James Bond and "Lord of the Rings," among many others. For avid players with professional ambitions to develop games, E.A. must appear to be the best place in the world. Writing cool games and getting paid to boot: what more could one ask?

Yet there is unhappiness among those who are living that dream. Based on what can be glimpsed through cracks in E.A.'s front facade, its high-tech work force is toiling like galley slaves chained to their benches.

"Extreme Galley Slave - The nextGen Reality TV show!"

Quote[/b] ]

The first crack opened last summer, when Jamie Kirschenbaum, a salaried E.A. employee, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, accusing it of failure to pay overtime compensation. He remains at the company, so I spoke with him by phone last week to get an update. He told me that since joining E.A. in June 2003 in the image production department, he has been working - at the company's insistence - around 65 hours a week, spread over six or seven days. Putting in long hours is what the industry calls "crunching." Once upon a time, the crunch came in the week or two before shipping a new release. Mr. Kirschenbaum's experience, however, has been a continuous string of crunches.

Crunches also once were followed by commensurate periods of time off. Mr. Kirschenbaum reports, however, that E.A. has scaled back informal comp time, never formally codified, to a token two weeks per project. He said his own promised comp time had disappeared altogether. At this point, he said he would be glad to enjoy a Labor Day without laboring, or eat a Fourth of July spread at some place other than his cubicle, pleasures he has not enjoyed for two years. The company said it had no comment on the lawsuit, but it is likely to argue that Mr. Kirschenbaum's image production position is exempt from the laws governing overtime compensation.

A few days ago, another crack opened - one large enough to fit a picture window. An anonymous writer who signed herself as "E.A. Spouse" posted on the Web a detailed account of hellish employer-mandated hours reaching beyond 80 hours a week for months. No less remarkable were the thousands of comments that swiftly followed in online discussion forums for gamers and other techies, providing volumes of similar stories at E.A. and at other game developers.

I learned the identity of the E.A. employee described in the anonymous account and spoke at length with him in person late one night, adding a third shift to the day's double that he'd already worked. He seemed credible in all respects, in his command of technical detail, in his unshakable enthusiasm for the games he works on - and in his pallor.

For around $60,000 a year in an area with a high cost of living, he had been set to work on a six-day-a-week schedule. On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added - noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.

By tradition, Silicon Valley employers have always offered their bleary-eyed employees lottery tickets in the form of stock options. E.A.'s option grants, however, offer little chance of a Google-like bonanza. An employee who started today with an options package like that of the E.A. worker just described (and who stayed with the company the four years required to fully vest) would get $120,000, for example, if the share price quadrupled - and proportionally less for more modest increases. The odds of a skyrocketing stock grew much longer this month, when the company said competition had forced it to cut prices on core sports titles.

Still, the company is a generous warden: free laundry service, free meals, free ice cream and snacks. The first month, the E.A. employee recalled, he and his colleagues were delighted by the amenities. But he said they soon came to feel that seeing the sun occasionally would have had more of a tonic effect.

Back to work chump! There's more mithril to mine out of Moria, ignore that Balrog trying to split you asunder.

Quote[/b] ]

This employee, who has not had a single day off in two months, is experienced in the game software business. But he said he had never before had to endure a death-march pace that begins many months before the beta testing phase that precedes the release of a project.

Jeff Brown, a company spokesman, declined to comment on E.A. Spouse's allegations. Mr. Brown did say that the company was interested in its employees' opinions, as illustrated by its employee survey, conducted every two years. This suggests that it needs to conduct a survey to learn whether a regular routine of 80-hour weeks is popular among the salaried rank and file.

Asked about reports of employees working long, uncompensated hours, Mr. Brown responded that "the hard work" entailed in writing games "isn't unique to E.A." He is correct; smaller studios demand it, too. The International Game Developers Association conducted an industrywide "quality of life" survey this year documenting that "crunch time is omnipresent." The study urged readers to tell "the young kids just starting out" in the industry to reject the hours that lock them into "an untenable situation once they start wanting serious relationships and families."

Electronic Arts' early history has none of the taint of present labor practices, and many who are acquainted with the old E.A. and the new E.A. have publicly lamented in Web forums the disappearance of the generosity practiced by Trip Hawkins, who founded the company in 1982. Mr. Hawkins, who has not been associated with E.A. for many years, said that he was not surprised by E.A. Spouse's story. He called today's E.A. a corporate "Picture of Dorian Gray," its attractive surface hiding a not-so-attractive reality.

INDEED, E.A. is noticeably young in appearance. After Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, spent a sabbatical last spring as a researcher at the company, he wrote, "I am 43 and I felt absolutely ancient during my time there." He said the place felt to him like "Logan's Run," the 1976 science fiction movie in which no one is allowed to live past 30 - and he felt even older when he realized that the 20-somethings were too young to know the reference.

The company has 3,300 employees in its studios developing game titles, and it hires 1,000 new people a year. (Company officials said voluntary turnover is about 10 percent annually.) In the past, it has hired only about 10 percent of new studio personnel directly from college; it has set a goal of increasing that to 75 percent, which would skew the median age still younger.

Professor Pausch listed cost savings from lower salaries as one reason E.A. wishes to shift hiring to a younger group. The company also recognizes that fresh graduates are the most suggestible; Professor Pausch said he heard managers say that "young kids don't know what's impossible." That, however, they will learn when they get their schedules.

The NY Times implying that even the legendary miser Ebenezeer Scrooge would, at this holiday season, be shocked by the "Galley Slave" treatment of the employees, is not something that the markets will be wanting to hear. As long as EA continues to brag about significant piles of revenue, the class-action lawyers will have ample reason to circle and close for the kill.

A couple possible outcomes of this. First, EA starts slashing jobs and outsourcing work to India. Productivity of bugs and counter-intuitive (to westerners) interfaces will skyrocket, and schedules wil tank. On the other hand, EA just bought out Digital Illusions, so you can kiss BF-2 goodbye.

[ralphwiggum 6]

On the other hand, EA just bought out Digital Illusions, so you can kiss BF-2 goodbye.  

oh yeah! they finally did something good!

Quote[/b] ]The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week.

Quote[/b] ]On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added - noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.

I can tell you from second-hand experience that this is indeed a very good description of the situation. I know a few guys who work at EA, and they don't have a life. Of course they really didn't have a life to begin with( ), but they no longer participate in a social meeting that we were a part of.

Quote[/b] ]Still, the company is a generous warden: free laundry service, free meals, free ice cream and snacks. The first month, the E.A. employee recalled, he and his colleagues were delighted by the amenities.

this can be best decribed as follows, from my observation from visiting another game company about 4-5 years ago.

when they say free meals, they have, cereals of different brands. IIRC, about 6-8 brands. Fresh fruit aplenty, plenty of drinks. they also have either a catering service of some sort, or you can order.

that company(eventually bought by EA) had slightly better environment for workers. each employee had their own room, which was like a single apartment(in US single apt means just one room, not a living room AND a bedroom), with couch that can be used as bed. basically the idea was to use that place just like a house.

[ozanzac 0]

I feel very sorry for the people working at EA, California.

Working employees into the ground, as stated, is not a great way of boosting productivity.

It should be illegal, and smart management would consider turning away from normal office hours + overtime, and looking at creating morning/afternoon/night shifts. That way, they can keep the workers happy, and can continue to pump out games at a phenomenal rate.

[gandalf the white 0]

to any EA employer... sorry for hating you for not patching any games...

this is definatly the last EA product i've bought! (allright it was after C&C Generals and BF:Vietnam).

poor guys... worst thing is that:

1) theyr studio gets bought

2) they must pump out a game @ 84 hrs a week

3) they recieve minimal payment and the studio gets closed down after one or two games.

<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>BASTARDS!!!</span>

[shadow 6]

Well now we know why there is never anything new or newthinking in EA titles.

Because the employees are worked into the ground and not even getting paid for it. I must say this is not a surprise. It kinda matches with all the garbage they pump out and all the millions invested in PR for the garbage they are pumping out. EA titles also always more expensive than others.

Put all that together and you got a corporate monster trying to take over the world and trying to achieve monopoly in the process.

And that's why I stopped buying EA products a long time ago.

I believe Jane's Longbow 2 was the last.

[Radnik 18]

... I bet that 80% of those managers,bosses and chiefs of EA company can`t even see difference between BF:Vietnam and BF:SW ... or worse, maybe they have them on home shelfs but never put in CD/DVD device(as for playing campaing ), never had time cose new title is on its way, so in this way programmers and designers can and will make "neverending" same tipe of game as long as it sales good (there allways be new kids)

on its way: BF:Vietnam Road to US, BF:Vietnam Secret Weapons, BF:Vietnam Cold War Crisis(:)), BF:Vietnam patch v234897.13446,you need version v234897.13445 to work ....

its only Vietnam, but all those other games

you see what i mean

[bn880 5]

Right okay, there is another strategy to doing the same thing, which also is not very Kosher: Hiring dozens if not hundreds of developers/programmers seeming for full time permanent positions, when really the plan is jsut to finish a product and then fire them. It is equally frustrating and bad for the employees, who are lead to beleive they have a sami-stable job, when in reality they are as good as short contract work. Nice...

[shinRaiden 0]

[crashdome 3]

Ya know... if they got all those disgruntled employees together and started a new company.....

hmmmm.....

Maybe BIS will hire em?

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Ya know... if they got all those disgruntled employees together and started a new company.....

hmmmm.....

Maybe BIS will hire em?  

Isn't Infinity Ward, the maker of Call of Duty largely made up of EA's former Medal of Honor team?

[General Barron 0]

I'll agree that this is a deplorable way to run a business and to treat your employees... but I'd hardly jump to the conclusion that Big Brother needs to step in and "set things right".

Nobody is forcing those people to work there. If they don't like it, they can leave. It sounds harsh and "unfair", but it is true. But it is just as harsh and unfair to tell business owners what they can and can not ask of their employees.

If things are so bad at EA, then why does this person still work there? Better yet, why don't a bunch of like-minded employees band together and form a union, which were specificially invented for this sort of situation (unlike the politicial lobbies most are today)?

These employees are educated, in demand "rich" people. If they need government to come in and whipe their arses, then what about the rest of us blue-collar folk? Why don't we just all work for the government, for crying out loud. Wouldn't that just solve everything?

What ever happened to personal responsibility? I can't imagine what it would be like to live my life depending on the government to fix everything that I don't like.