Over 100 Riot Games Employees Walked Out to End Forced Arbitration

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evyz7p/over-100-riot-games-employees-walked-out-today-to-end-forced-arbitration

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

48 38 7 years ago

0x70dd• 7 years ago

Is there an upside of arbitration for employees? From what I read it's mostly for the benefit of the company. How is it even legal to forcefully take away the right of settling matters in court?

thwythwy• 7 years ago

because Scalia.

aeternus• 7 years ago

The upside is lower cost for both parties. Courts mostly require a lawyer to successfully navigate.

The goal of civil court is to enforce contracts. If both parties agree via a contract to solve any disagreements with 3rd party arbitration, why wouldn't that be legal?

Tostino• 7 years ago

Generally employer / employee relationship, the employer has vastly more bargaining power. Obviously this is no absolution, but I wouldn't say that forced arbitration is a fair practice under those circumstances is fair practice.

fallingfrog• 7 years ago

Give’m hell! That’s how you get things done.

danbrooks2• 7 years ago

It's nice to see a civil protest. Both sides seemed interested in compromise and moving the company forward.

theaustinseven• 7 years ago

Really? It looks more like Riot is doing the absolute minimum to make it look like they are actually interested. They won't get rid of forced arbitration for current or past employees, and new employees only get to opt out(I wonder how many hoops they'll have to jump through for that). Current employees can't even opt out at this point.

Avshalom2• 7 years ago

They don't even get to actually opt out, just "for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims"; the qualifier "individual" is probably doing a lot of heavy lifting too.

danbrooks2• 7 years ago

My sense is that Riot executive are supportive of making a change. Legal, on the other hand, might not want to restart arbitrations and rewrite contracts.

CydeWeys2• 7 years ago

I don't think we've ever seen an uncivil protest in tech. It hasn't gotten bad enough to warrant it. Nothing like the literal battles of the original labor movement during the gilded age that had double digit death tolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

razakel2• 7 years ago

It's nice to see a civil protest. Both sides seemed interested in compromise and moving the company forward.

It's almost as if collective bargaining actually works. Why is tech one of the few sectors with no real unions?

setr• 7 years ago

I’m struggling to think of other white collar jobs that have unionized; at least in the US. Examples?

Kalium• 7 years ago

I know more than one person in tech who is deeply skeptical of the idea of unionization. I'll go with my concerns. Among other things, unions are sometimes known to do things like prize seniority and standardize entry requirements across an entire sector. Which is to say entrench credentialism and ageism. I don't want to see all my self-taught colleagues thrown out, or the ladder pulled up behind them. And in a sector that already has ageism problems, I don't see how writing it down will make it better.

Sometimes I hear "It doesn't have to be that way!" from unionization supporters. I have no doubt that they are correct - no union has to turn out that way. This possibility gives me little assurance.

Further, most of the time pitches come in the form of "Don't you care about privacy? Join the union and together we can!". Which often comes across as someone looking for tech money to fund their advocacy rather than genuinely trying to improve the working condititons of people in tech.

unseenbastiat5• 7 years ago

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?

Sir_Substance• 7 years ago

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?

unseenbastiat5• 7 years ago

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.

harimau777• 7 years ago

There is often a significant power difference between an employer and someone seeking employment. Once the seeker becomes the employee they have more power and can band with other employees to pool their power. Therefore, there's not a particularly realistic way for someone to negotiate these sorts of things before they are hired.

unseenbastiat5• 7 years ago

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.

throwaway082729• 7 years ago

Is this the same harimau from rasikas.org?

r00fus• 7 years ago

Sounds like a contract of adhesion to me.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

OT, but when a statement begins "let me get this straight" you just know that an uncharitable interpretation of events will immediately follow. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

johnday• 7 years ago

I think it's just a variant on the all-time classic, "I'm not a racist, but...".

People try to pre-empt the obvious response (in this case, "you are being uncharitable") with a basic retort ("I'm just trying to get this straight")

nwsm• 7 years ago

At first I thought the title meant that Riot "walked them out" ie fired them and walked them out of the building on the spot.

Over 100 Riot Games Employees Walked Out to End Forced Arbitration

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