Still Have A Job? You're Doing Better Then These Guys

As someone who became involuntarily unemployed once myself I always hate to see this sort of thing happen regardless of industry, location, et cetera.

Did we ever find out if there was any validity to http://days-since-cheyenne-mountain-employees-have-been-paid.com/ ?

I’m sorry for all the people who have lost their jobs. That’s unfortunate, though I fear it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It does point out one thing though: Joining a ‘big’ company as opposed to a small one does not mean your job is stable. (Yes, I’m a little biased towards small companies but the point remains.)

Naah, what fundamentally killed Circuit City was that it’s basically indistinguishable from Best Buy, except not as good.

I have to agree with Matt here, smaller companies are much better at obtain better employees. It is not unusual for larger companies to have many people who doesn’t do much.

And you can’t blame companies for wanting to profit. If you have $1000 and invested in a company, would you rather donate it to the company so they don’t lay off people?

The economy works because companies tries to create value, in the process they hire people. If you make them a charity, the whole thing will tank. US is in its current position because people in US tried to live beyond their means. Big houses, free health care and only work 40 hours or less per week? LOL.

Being unemployed for some time now is fun! So much free time to think and play games… Oh, yeah, the lack of money. I guess it doesn’t bother me as much.

My brother works as a product tester for Nintendo. They just cut like 25 guys the other night (out of a force of like 150+ testers). He must’ve just missed the axe, as he’s only been working there for about 6 months.

“Best Buy is good? New flash to me.”

But apparently not news to all the people who shop at BB and not at CC.

The $80 an hour cost is a bit of propaganda put out there by anti-union activist. I’m not saying unions are good, or that they are bad. But union auto workers make around $30 an hour. The $80 an hour figure includes ALL labor costs, including retirees.

So maybe we should take a soylent green solution to our workers to help our labour costs? Once you’re too old and unproductive to work, we’ll just feed you to the productive workers?

The economic problems were not caused by some unionized auto workers getting good health care. And the unfortunate workers being laid off right now are about to face the truth about just how unfree health care is. Anyone who’s been forced onto a COBRA knows the leason all to well.

No one is demanding free health care on a 40 hour work week and subsidized 4 bedroom, 1 & 1/2 bath homes. It’s not the workers fault for this mess. It’s an insult to those suffering to say it is.

The people who make Madden games shouldn’t be fired; the people who buy Madden games should be shot.

While wowpanda may not have correct numbers, consider that, in most cases, the companies are losing money. I’m amazed that so many people think it’s all about stockholders. If you’re losing money you cut expenditures and employees are expenditures. Sony is losing money this year for only the second time in their history. Microsoft saw Apple earn more than they did in 2007. You can either be a charity case and keep employees until you’re forced to close or you can lay some off now and try to make it work from here on out. If you make no money, you go out of business (or are a government entity who gets bailed out).

While EA will sell units on the Madden games (and any other game teams that got laid off) it remains to be seen whether or not they’ll even break even in terms of sales. Remember that it takes millions to make a video game these days. That’s a lot of units to move.

As far as the unions, the bulk of the problem is that the unions had crazy demands. Consider that GM is closing plants down. While I would be remiss to say that GM’s woes are solely due to UAW, UAW isn’t helping things. Per union contract the employees of any closed plant get around 90% of their normal paycheck for the next 2 years for doing nothing. Then there’s the “jobs bank” where GM is paying 3500 people not to work. That’s just the tip of the iceberg there. You’ll note that GM needs government money to stay afloat while none of the companies in the list at the top are unionized OR asking for bailout money.

Concerning the unions, I agree the job banks is (was) nonsense. I will not pretend to defend the follies of unions. They are real, and they should be addressed. And if you focus only on what unions do wrong, you can make a very damning case against them. You can blame the burning forest on that one tree.

But the unions did not start this fire. Labour unions are just one factor the leadership of the Big Three have to deal with. It is one factor in the they have to balance. Management was not innocent babes in the woods, victimized by evil, overpowered workers.

What bugs me about wowpanda post is how quicly we, as a species, can dichotomize an issue and then blame the problem on the victims.

It’s the citizens fault for the pain he feels because the citizen tried to live beyond his means. Losing your job,your fault. You wanted a big house. And that was just wrong. Didn’t get a big house? Well, the unions want you to have one as well as free health care, on 30 hours a week. And it’s your fault for working for a big company. Should have stayed with a small company.

Since this is a gaming blog, I’ll try to put it in gaming terms. It’s like blaming the failure of a new, anticipated, deeply flawed MMO on the players. The creators of the game are not to blame. The players played wrong, wanted too much, want everything for free, are whiners, are lazy, are mouth breathers, are too impatient to wait for the next patch, do not understand the developers vision.

Well, sometimes the game is just does not work. And right now, our economic system is just not working. The coding is bad, the balance is off, the end game sucks.

So, I agree with a lot of what Boanerges says. Unions have major flaws. And , yes, none of the companies on the list have unions OR are asking for bailout money. But if you look at a list of companies getting bailout money, most do not have unions. Unless there is a huge bankers union I have not heard about.

@Delurm

1. 5 day work week
2. 40 hours paid with overtime if needed
3. 8 hour workday
4. child labor laws (directly because it *was* common to send your kid to work full time at 12)
5. minimum wage

Unions didn’t do this, technological advancement did. Unions are only responsible for number 4 because they wanted to eliminate competition, and number 5 isn’t even a good thing.

http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=511

@Delurm
Unions does good things initially (and sometimes now and then), although I don’t agree totally with your list of 10. It is all about productivity. If it is a 100 year ago, without the tools, the 10 year old has to work in farms or face hunger.

I have no problems with CEOs taking millions. If they are good ones, they creat jobs for others. If they re bad ones, they are simply liching money away from the major shareholders (usually the biggest of them are some dumb ultra rich guy). When rich dumb guys make mistakes, there is a nature transfer of wealth from them to all who work in the company. The only exception will be when they got bail out money.

Unions on the other hand, have became so powerful now they are not the old balancer they used to be. They are like a tumor, once they got on to a company, big or small, they slowly choke them. To this day I still don’t understand why they do that.

@wowpanda: I also have no troubles with CEOs and other board members taking home millions, but I do believe that it’s always suspect when they lay off employees without first take a reduction cut in their own pay / benefits / etc.. In fact, I think there should be regulations for just such situations.

I believe in capitalism even if I have some socialist leanings (I believe some things should be handled by government simply because the dream for a small gov’t is an absurd utopia but a responsible gov’t is a more reasonable expectation)– but I digress, that’s just to place exactly where I stand: I absolutely believe there are too many of the wrong regulations for public corporations and not enough of the right ones. And we got this way because of the near-religious two sides of ‘free’ market proponents versus social ideals.

I agree with Delurm’s sentiment that shareholder value should not be the prime directive. Any company, publicly owned or privately, should first look to the long term health of the company. The shareholder value mantra is one of the biggest causes of an inflationary economy (that eventually, as we’ve learned, must crash).

This is all philosophical itself of course.. and on that note I’d like to point out:

EA is not GM.

Being relatively close to the situation (once removed I’d say, friends that are now unemployed), I have several opinions of why EA took big cuts out of Black Box and they have less to do with sales and profit and more to do with speculation and internal politics. Black Box has done well, but until about a month ago they still operated very independently and have mostly Canadian employees (EA Canada for instance, has a mix of nationalities and is American owned). There are other factors too, but the point is there’s more involved than “stock is down” or “sales are down”.

@bog exactly! your post is the middle point where everyone might be coverage on. gov’t can’t be too big or too small, there is a comfort zone somewhere in between. I believe the current size is too big, the evidence is very clear (see all the pork flying?).

And your statement about shareholders and long term health of their company also applies to this country, as the president should have courage to take care long term health of the country instead bow down to current voter demand.

Big companies are often plagued with politics, so are big governments. We should never put most of our tax dollar into a big pot and let the Fed share that to failed companies/states. We could have much less corruption if most tax are managed locally.

@wowpanda

I don’t have a problem with people being rich – I have a problem when the standards aren’t applied evenly.

Union guy makes $50 an hour? Good for him. The CEO making 25 mil a year on average make $25000 an hour. Are both of them worth it? That’s the companies decision isn’t it? But don’t try to make me feel bad for a company that pays the CEO so much because they have to pay the little guy too.

And my comment about stock options wasn’t to lower a CEO’s salary – I say if a company wants to pay the CEO $25 mil a year then let them – but don’t tie his salary to the stock so much that gaming the books/system to increase his personal net worth is more important than the health of the company.

Greed is a powerful motivator – dangle millions in front of anyone and even if they don’t take it – they had to consider it.

Morality doesn’t make someone immune from temptation – it just makes them strong enough to resist. History shows us that if the temptation is large enough most will give in – and *that* is where giving huge bonuses through stock options is worthless.

I suppose there is one other way to do it upon reflection of the matter. Tie the stock options together with a 15 year provision – then and only then will you see CEO’s trying to look further ahead than 2-3 years (when they become vested and get the legal ability to sell these days)

Pump and dump – it’s not just for short timers anymore.

“You want something to blame…. blame stock options – pass a law that says executive level positions can no longer receive stock options as part of their compensation and this economic mess will right itself again.”

And I thought I was th eonly one who argued that usually flamed opinion. As far as I am concerned it is printing cash, and as long as they don’t get greedy they can get away with it. If they get to greedy and tank the stock they end up skipping to the next company after a hefty cash severance package.

That’s backwards, a “for the good of the business decision” would always be cash for bonusses, stock for severance. Printing stock to give someone cash you don’t want to take from earnings so you can pay him richly at the expense of shareholders should be illegal and it has always amazed me the SEC allows it. Any other organization did the equivalent and they would find themselves in jail.

I am going to avoid the union debate as I do not like getting into it. These EA lay offs are nothing new for us here in Vancouver. On July 2nd Backbone Vancouver did it’s second round of layoffs so from April til July 110 people lost their jobs. Then a couple weeks later Radical did their lay offs. Which was 100+ people. Then EA did a 400+ person world wide layoff so EAC (Burnaby) and Blackbox got nailed for about 70 people I believe. A couple of up and coming companies have faltered and now EA has laid off 200 people in the city. Blackbox was shut down and more are coming to the EAC campus.

And just yesterday the Vancouver branch of Nexon shut down. Nexon was not in the red and it shut down the studio completely.
All I can say to people who work in games at this moment is be prepared for anything. It took me 6 months to find something here in Vancouver.

Fuckedcompany.com is having a field day… oh, wait. Nevermind.

Spitt, wow, that’s… completely wrong on just about every factual point.

Unions have very little to do with the collapse of the auto-industry. People just plain aren’t buying cars anymore, especially not the big SUVs that the big three heavily invested in. Their market has basically collapsed due to the recession and the spike of high gas prices we were having.

And US workers are legitimately some of the most productive in the entire world, though this is partially due to the benefits of technology. But if you look at the amount of work that a US worker completes in a given interval, it’s comparable or better to most other nations. The reason why companies outsource is because they can pay lower wages and there are less workers rights to run afoul of – basically they can exploit their workforce to greater levels – not because of any sort of productivity gap.

And the US, when viewed as a whole, is actually well below just about every other industrialized country when it comes to healthcare. Our coverage is more expensive and less effective compared to nations with socialized health care. If you’re super rich, you can afford some of the best medical care in the world, sure. But that’s not an option for 90% of the population which get substandard care instead.

You also should study history a little more. Attempting to balance the budget would be a huge mistake right now. Examine what happened when FDR attempted to move toward balancing the budget in 37 and the economy basically started to tank again. In times of severe recession the only solution is massive deficit spending because the private sector will simply not invest and you’ve run out of other options. There’s a strong risk of falling into what’s called a liquidity trap like Japan did during the 80s and 90s where people don’t spend money and you’ve got an excess of capacity that’s just plain not being used. In other words, the economy can be fine in terms of fundamentals and still not recover because people won’t buy things or make large business investments. If you look at what FDR did to pull us out of the Great Depresion, the efficacy of public spending should be obvious; WW2 was the single largest public works program ever, in effect. You got near 100% employment, and as soon as the war ended and the rationing and restrictions on certain things got lifted, that money got spent really quickly.

If you also look at the US between FDR all the way up to Regan, the economy was in the greatest state of prosperity that the country has ever known, with strong GDP and relative economic equality. There were still some problems, and inflation wasn’t understood well enough to deal with it quite right, but things were pretty good. There were also ridiculously high taxes on the super-rich, including an estate tax that pretty much prevented any sort of finacial lineages from developing and unions were at their strongest.

The idea that unions and high taxes on the rich are inherently bad for the economy doesn’t have any merit, as historically, those things went hand in hand with extreme economic prosperty.