Rami Ismail has a great running commentary on a complaint that game design workers are ‘wage-slave’ whiners if they want to focus on a sane work/life balance.
Instead of, you know, pouring 80 to 100 hours a week into a company where the funding, scheduling, and management issues might be so inefficient that the project suffers, the workers burn out, and the game developer turns out a substandard game. (Have we seen this at all, in the last 20 years in the gaming world? Oh, god, have we…)
I used to work at an art manufacturing firm where the management consistently got one thing very, very right: they hammered home: “Work smarter, not harder”, and tried to help the employees do that. They didn’t always succeed, and they had other huge flaws, but I thank them for that lesson.
The game development world isn’t the only one asking brutally-long hours a week from its employees. The financial and stock industry is becoming legendary for suicidal burnout of its members, who are expected to prove themselves or go home. Creative-work folks are regularly expected to work for free, or for ‘exposure’. Exposure won’t pay the mortgage, chumps. Artists need to get paid.
The Japanese corporate culture even has a word for death by overwork: Karoshi. They’re even trying to roll it back. Because science is finding out that yes, hard work can kill you.
One of Rami’s comments resonates very strongly with me: “Your complaint here is literally that someone asked to be paid fairly.”
In an era when dueling business strategies either endorse or bitterly fight higher proposed minimum wage increases in America, the concept of ‘fair wage’ can be fluid between fields and geographic regions.
There’s a point to the understandable resentment of someone who clawed their way to $15 an hour from $8 over years, upon finding out that all the newer, less experienced hires might be starting out there.
There’s still the flip, fall-back fallacy that “Oh, minimum-wage jobs are just starter jobs, people will work their way up.” That’s not what the American market has shown, during this ‘recovery’. More people are working fewer hours at lower-paying jobs. More are at risk of losing their housing and stability, because their rent is a far higher proportion of income. I won’t even get started on the absurdity that is the American health-care system. Even those of us who do have good jobs…are often contractors in charge of our own taxes and healthcare, and with minimal loyalty to our employers.
There’s the veiled or open threat: “Like it or leave” to workers who fight inefficient or extreme hours. All too often, trapped by family and financial obligations, they silently tough it out.
What’s the solution? Probably a nested series of initiatives and programs. Some sane business decisions. Businesses that bother to realistically schedule projects, instead of chronically running on adrenaline fueled deadlines.
“Work/life balance” is not a dirty phrase. It’s survival.