unseenbastiat

That story is nice and it’s plausible. It’s also subtlety different from the story told by the article.

For instance, nobody admitted they didn’t read the fine print or objected at the time, or anything like that. In light of that, my story that “some employees had a change of heart about their contracts and took up activism” would be just as valid. You might not care about that distinction, but it puts the events in a slightly different light from the other explanation about “employees don’t have leverage when they were being hired”.

And yeah, your story would also make sense if this was a play about taking the power back over their own contracts. But considering that they are still striking over existing employee contracts would contradict your story.

Since I’m being downvoted anyway, fuck it. I think these employees are being duplicitous or at least misleading about their intentions. I think their activism has overridden any ideals they might have had about negotiating power. And I think “forced arbitration” is not worthy of moral condemnation. You are free to tell me all the ways those are terribly wrong ways to think.

If you take what people say at face value, then sure, the issue is simple. I think that’s an unwise presumption to always make, but YMMV.

But even assuming your explanation is correct, it is incomplete. Why now? This guy has been with the company for a while. He is hardly the only bad actor at the company, so why does his case merit more focus? Have a confluence of factors reached a tipping point? Do employees feel secure enough about their status that they can make this move?

Sure. There’s still some missing pieces of the motivation puzzle missing here, such as why this issue, why this point in time, why don’t employees exercise this option more often if this is a legit negotiating tactic, etc.

At the risk of being cynical, my guess is that this is a PR stunt as much as it’s an employment negotiation. We the outside observers would be the pawns of this tactic that can produce public sentiment to influence Riot. That’s why I’m not so quick to categorize this as simply another contract negotiation.

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.

Let me get this straight:

Potential hires were offered an employment contract with terms that included the settling certain disputes through arbitration. They accepted the offer and signed the contract. Now these people are not only are trying to nullify that clause, they’re adopting an air of moral superiority because they think that clause should never have existed.

Not only does this seem unsympathetic to me, it seems impractical. Why would you go work for a company that seemingly doesn’t share your values only to later take an activist stance to try and change said company?

Why do you go through this amount of work for preserving your privacy? Honest question out of curiosity.

Unfortunately, one study cannot “debunk” anything.

Between the state of conflicting information in epidemiology, the replication crisis in science in general, self reporting methodology, publication bias, etc . . . there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. That’s not even a remark on the findings; even if the findings were the opposite, all these undermining factors would remain.

The urge to use the same flag for both B and A is probably motivated by a desire either to clean up the code by not using redundant flags. Or perhaps it was implicitly part of a forward-thinking (in theory, well intentioned) design to avoid separate flag B in the future.

Either way, it shows some attempt at longer-term thinking undone by short term implementation done improperly. That’s a microcosm of this story as a whole which gives this incident a fractal quality.