Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

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Contracts are a negotiation.

There's nothing wrong with one side or the other asking for a negotiation or renegotiation in good faith. Contracts are not immutable, they get amended all the time for all sorts of reasons.

Choosing to withhold your labor until a renegotiation happens is an extreme tactic that is likely to generate bad faith from the other party long term, but it's always legal and always moral because our society considers slavery unacceptable.

Contracts are an important part of working conditions, as are workers perceptions of self-worth. If your contractual working conditions are demeaning such that you're prepared to not get paid and potentially risk being terminated in order to protest the demeaning conditions, no reasonable person would attempt to force you to work.

It is to the companies benefit in these cases that knowledgeable employees attempt to solve the problem rather than simply leaving. It is much cheaper to amend contracts than train new workers. This is a classic case where amending relevant contracts benefits everyone.

Is that does that help you straighten this out?

Appreciate the reply, but we may be talking past each other here. Note I didn’t take the position of “you signed the contract, suck it up”. Renegotiations can and do happen.

Like you point out, people could get potentially be fired for walking out. At that point, those employees have demonstrated that having this clause changed is worth potentially not having this job. If that’s the case, why didn’t they negotiate on that clause before they were hired? Same things at stake, same gambit, just more direct.

Furthermore, now that these employees are trying to renegotiate after having worked with such terms in place for a time, what prompted this change? Were they once accepting of such terms but changes their mind? Or did they not object when that clause was only in their own contract, but now that they see it in other peoples contracts they are inspired to make some company-wide change? The motivations are far from clear.

The other part of the above comment left unaddressed is the implicit demonstration of priorities seems strange. The games industry has plenty of turnover, burnout, and rough conditions. So when some people choose to work in the games industry, presumably out of passion, their opportunity cost is substantial. Meanwhile, Riot Games has had a history of bad/abusive behavior within the company. So what kind of person does it take to go work at Riot but later decide “this is the issue where I’m taking a stand.” If they cared that much about working some place they like, and Riot already has this history, it seems strange to later be indignant about their workplace.

> If that’s the case, why didn’t they negotiate on that clause before they were hired?

One employee has much less bargaining power than 100, especially in the wildly asymmetric dynamic of the hiring process.

If that’s the case, why didn’t they negotiate on that clause before they were hired?

Are you going to lend them your time machine so they can go back and change mistakes they made in the past? If not, I guess all they can do about mistakes made in the past is take action here in the present.

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