Ubisoft Employees In France have gone on a Strike

https://playstationcouch.com/post.php?id=161

by cannibalXxx • 2 years ago

117 175 2 years ago

jMyles• 2 years ago

Ubisoft Employees In France have gone on a Stike

Presumably the spelling oddity in this headline is a typo - the article calls the event a "day of organized strike action." (emphasis mine)

DotaFan• 2 years ago

Just wondering, does this mean OP c/p it wrong or bot is posting and it reused same title?

zxexz• 2 years ago

It's pretty common for someone to read an article and find it interesting, c/p the title, and submit it with a link, so I assume the former.

romantomjak• 2 years ago

I'm consistently impressed by French solidarity to just go on a strike until they get their government (or a company in this case) to start treating them fairly. I wish that could work in the UK, but alas, we don't do that here.

kevmo2• 2 years ago

To nitpick:

It WOULD work, but alas, you don't do it.

This is also why the USA has all those anti-strike laws, especially regarding railroads.

tunnuz• 2 years ago

It might have something to do with being chased by brutal horse-mounted police and beaten up in the past.

reaperman2• 2 years ago

It WOULD work, but alas, you don't do it. This is also why the USA has all those anti-strike laws.

My mom did it reasonably often as a teacher. The state made it illegal for her to ever strike again. Maybe not being willing to go to jail for refusing to work is why she doesn't do it? It's crazy to me that the law is basically "show up to work for whatever we decide to pay you, or go to jail" (via contempt of court, usually, if they continue to strike after a judge orders teachers to go back to work and fines them for each day of missed work).

So the other option is to "strike" by quitting and starting over in a completely new career. Enough people have done that that some schools are having trouble opening[0]. Somehow even that doesn't seem to raise wages. So -- for teachers at least, striking literally doesn't work. Enough teachers quit that schools can't stay open, and yet the wages don't rise to hire enough teachers. It's insane.

0: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/us/teacher-shortage-lowering-...

phantomathkg• 2 years ago

This is also why the USA has all those anti-strike laws, especially regarding railroads.

And the people suffer?

gambiting4• 2 years ago

The British national motto is literally "well, what are you going to do". I have no idea what it would take for the general population to strike.

mattmanser• 2 years ago

We're going through serious strikes at the moment.

Right now, the junior doctors are striking.

Not sure what you mean by general population, but we had major riots about 10 years ago where some police stations got attacked.

nxm• 2 years ago

What would a general population strike be calling for? Be very specific - aren’t elections a form of a general population strike?

bionsystem2• 2 years ago

In France striking is a fundamental right just like marching (assuming you make the demand to the authorities and it gets accepted). However what I dislike about the situation is that everybody strikes and manifests for his own core interest separately. I think we should really get into a more coordinated effort. Most of those strikes have failed.

wazoox• 2 years ago

You're not asking for the authority to accept you to march, you simply announce that you'll march, which, as a fundamental right, can't be rejected by the authorities beforehand unless there are serious reasons to believe that major trouble will occur. Though in the recent years several protests were forbidden by the authorities, it still is completely exceptional, and the marches happened anyway (and of course, major fights with the police ensued).

southerntofu4• 2 years ago

This is not entirely wrong, but is misleading. Yes, striking is supposed to be a protected worker right, but there are entire regulations to follow for that ("préavis" / "droit de retrait" etc). However, it was not always the case and for most of french history striking was illegal and heavily repressed. It's important to note, because in the past decade or so there's been massive retaliation against some organized workers in certain corporations and even in public services like La Poste. Striking is only protected as long as the balance of power shifts in our direction, and it's fair to say that the bourgeoisie has been gaining momentum while we have lost significant rights since Sarkozy, and our protests have been heavily repressed including maiming and murders by cops.

As for demonstrations, what you said is incorrect. There is no obligation for the prefecture to approve your request before you go on a demo. There is indeed an obligation to declare it but unless it's explicitly forbidden you are go. It used to be, not so long ago that undeclared demos were legal and i believe it was only under nazi occupation that they weren't. Sarkozy changed that to repress young people hanging out in public spaces by making 3 people or more hanging out together illegal.

It's important to understand that outlawing demonstrations in France (along with other obvious signs of growing fascism) are a rather recent phenomenon. Except for workers/ecologist or pro-Gaza demonstrations repressed in the past decade, the last forbidden demonstrations in France date from the 60s (in support of Algerian independence).

Still, they'll never stop our "manif sauvage" :)

boudin• 2 years ago

Some people do in the uk, I like this website to have an idea of what's happening in the country: https://www.strikecalendar.co.uk/

saiya-jin3• 2 years ago

Solidarity? You must live far from actual France and have some romantic young rosy view on events far away. Almost everybody who isn't protesting is pissed off at folks protesting, since they block you from doing basic things in life like going to work, shopping groceries, driving anywhere or flying, taking train, going to gas station, going to hospital (I kid you not, you can be unlucky and literally die to negligence when health care sector goes on strike and nobody would bat an eye too much, and french public health care sector is not in good state currently). Cca half of my colleagues commute daily to work from France, so I have some group of quite opinionated citizens that express their honest opinions loudly outside of French borders.

There are often good causes behind strikes. What they actually do though every single time, is take rest of civilian population as hostages, make their life as miserable as possible for as long as possible, to create pressure on politicians.

See a little flaw in the logic above? You consistently end up in the crowd of hostages that take various pressures from side to side, often in matters unrelated to yours (say massive subsidies to diary farmers should be even more massive, nobody got time to improve efficiency or processes so market gets distorted more and more and local farmers are brutally incompetitive on their own), and you and your family suffers.

US population would not handle such massive things nicely I believe, not with so many guns and gun/freedom culture in general population.

omnimus3• 2 years ago

Yeah you shouldnt strike because you could disturb those who like how the system works!! (because it works for them)

Solidarity doesnt mean being nice to others. Its awarnes of shared interests and acepting/enduring some pains for others. This includes understanding that you might not be striking today but you might in future.

southerntofu4• 2 years ago

You must watch a lot of french propaganda to have some romantic young rosy view on "hostage taking". Except for those who profit from the system's abuses (such as your colleagues) most people very much support the strikes. It's only the TV stations claiming otherwise, but look at the actual polls for example against the pension reform last year...

Can you name a single person that died due to health care strikes? No, because even when on strike health care workers perform their duties. They simply wear a badge or demonstrate outside of job hours. You're just spitting outright lies. However, we can name the many people (the number keeps rising every year) dying from job "accidents", which is one of the reasons unions and strikes exist.

Solidarity is precisely supporting others in their struggles. And yes, there is a lot of that. If you actually went on a strike's picket line, you would see a lot of different people from different jobs, including unemployed or retired people. Some people bring coffee or food, others materials to build barricades or wood to burn to keep warm in winter... Not everyone is as selfish as your colleagues who only care about missing a train and not why people are actually on strike.

All power to the Ubisoft workers, and to all other workers on strike.

xwolfi• 2 years ago

I was so impressed that I left France forever and Im never coming back. Couch activists like you have no idea the misery those constant distracting productivity-killing micro-movements do to the country in aggregate.

I wish you could enjoy them in your country and we wouldnt have to. But well, as long as we can leave France when we dont like it I guess it's fine.

buro9• 2 years ago

it could work in the UK, the union you want is this one: https://utaw.tech/about/ UTAW United Tech & Allied Workers although others are options too (UTAW is part of the CWU Communications Workers Union).

want better rights and working conditions: join a union, get everyone that you can to join the union, strikes do work.

want better salaries: decline jobs solely and purely on the basis of the salary not meeting expectations, the signal that they cannot hire because no-one accepts the salary forces an employer to pay more. leave jobs that are not paying well, and give that single reason in the exit interview.

both require the same thing... solidarity amongst the workers.

it doesn't work in the UK because of a lack of that, everyone is very much in it for themselves, and so there is no solidarity. but better salaries and conditions are achievable everywhere that there is solidarity. the starting point can be to join a union, but needs to include everyone talking about their rights and conditions and discussing unions.

Signal is a great tool btw... DO NOT discuss unions on work owned channels, take the conversation elsewhere. where I work embraces a healthy relationship between the employer and employee, but I've been at places before where merely talking about a union would get you fired some entirely unrelated thing.

oh, and be very prepared to fight for people in a weaker position than you. the basis of a union is that when you act in solidarity to protect the weakest, you protect everyone else too. the poem First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller, this works in the context of workers rights too... protect your trans, black, women, disabled colleagues, and if they have equality and fair treatment, then you almost certainly all do.

manojlds• 2 years ago

Yeah we NEED more strikes in the UK

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

the uk also have strikes, at least with transportation. this was my observation during my first visit.

realusername4• 2 years ago

Just a correction on the article, you don't need to be unionized to participate to a strike in France and I doubt there's as many in the union as they claim.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

French Software Engineers make $60k per year. I'm sure they wonder why and think striking / unionizing is the answer

askonomm3• 2 years ago

Is 60k bad? Pretty sure it's the average salary in the entire Europe.

throwawaysleep• 2 years ago

Only making the avg salary after some fairly technical education is pretty bad.

INTPenis3• 2 years ago

It's pretty low for a software engineer, this is coming from a Swede. I know people inside Ubisoft and they have notoriously low salaries.

I work in telco and we pay our developers more than Ubisoft does.

janmo• 2 years ago

60k EUR before taxes and healthcare + retirement deduction I suppose. So after taxes and mandatory deductions it is 45k USD, which not that much if you are in a city like Paris.

dheera2• 2 years ago

Average salary isn't an excuse if it's unlivable.

It's hard to live on 60K in Europe when a goddamn power cord costs 15 Euro

laurentlb• 2 years ago

When I applied to a Ubisoft studio in 2011, the recruiter sent me an email during the hiring process:

[...] we would like to move forward in the process. As you may know, our salaries in the games industry do not compare well with overall IT industry salaries; however, we can offer one of the most prominent development studios in the world [...]

I don't have more information, but they seemed well aware their salaries were not competitive.

walidthedream5• 2 years ago

If you get satisfied with a 60k gross salary as an engineer wherever you are in Europe you should maybe question yourself unless you’re full remote in a Bulgarian country side. Cars cost the same everywhere, same goes for flight tickets , electronics, top universities tuition, major food or fashion brands, etc etc.

dgellow4• 2 years ago

The average in France is around 42k€ a year. 60k€ is perfectly decent compared to other professions. It’s also good but on the lower end for a non-senior software developer.

eloisant3• 2 years ago

It doesn't really make sense to talk about an "average salary in the entire Europe" because you have really big discrepancies.

You have high paying locations like Switzerland, Norway, UK, Ireland, Germany, etc, lowish locations like France, Italy, etc, and really low locations like Poland.

Technically you could calculate an overall average but that number would be useless.

Hamuko4• 2 years ago

What sorts of salary should French software engineers be making then? $80k? $100k? $200k?

isodev3• 2 years ago

The expectation is that salaries are periodically adapted to improve people's "purchase power". In Belgium for example, the yearly "indexation" of salaries is mandatory with a minimum of the inflation value from the previous year.

wsc981• 2 years ago

As freelancer in The Netherlands it’s easy to earn 100.000 EUR a year. Can’t imagine it would be much different in France as freelancer.

However, as freelancer it’s your own responsibility to save money for holidays, pension, sick leave, transportation, etcetera.

However, in the end you should still be financially better of than a “wage slave” so to speak.

johnnyanmac7• 2 years ago

Based on the current strikes, the main point is less about their current salary and more that they are technically taking pay hits due to Ubisoft not giving raises that keep up with inflation. They are effectively making less money now that they were in 2022.

realusername4• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what they earn in Ubisoft but game developers are on the lower end of software engineer salaries in general.

madsbuch6• 2 years ago

French employees are generelle low paid in cash. however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer.

currently, France had a serious issue with brain drain. software developers move to Germany or the UK to get higher salaries.

This gives a situation where all advanced jobs move out while simpler job stay back with really expensive labor protections.

IMHO, France need to assimilate more with the countries they live among, or other countries need to adopt better labor protection systems - this is solely a comparative thing. as an employee myself, I would hope for the latter.

silisili• 2 years ago

How are social protections for say, losing a job, health emergencies, and retirement?

90% of my drive for more and more money is the fear of long term unemployment and knowing there's nobody to come save me. If that fear didn't exist, I'd probably work for half the price to be honest.

realusername4• 2 years ago

French employees are generelle low paid in cash. however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer.

If the public services were much better than everywhere else the high taxation system might hold up but they clearly aren't, I would not put France in the European top 10 at this metric.

France need either to make people feel they are actually paying for something or reduce the taxation level.

fdgjgbdfhgb• 2 years ago

however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer

Maybe that was true in previous years, but I have found it very comforting to know that I'm almost unfirable (specially compared to my US peers), and even if I do get laid off I still have a ~12 month runway provided by the government.

eloisant3• 2 years ago

The problem of software developers in France is not that French salaries are lower than other countries overall, but software development salaries in France compared to other professions. In North America and Northern Europe countries software development is a high paying job, in France not as much.

But things are changing. Yes a lot of software dev jobs are crap (typically IT Services companies) but you also have Big Tech and other high paying tech companies in France. While it's still a bit less than other countries, as a senior you can easily get a TC above 130k euros even as an individual contributor.

ramchip• 2 years ago

This article is rather terrible. Here's a better one with actual explanations: https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/unions-call-strikes-ubisoft...

imiric• 2 years ago

Good luck to them, but why would you want to work for such an awful company anyway? Even in the 3A (or "4A"...) space, there are much better studios, in Europe and elsewhere. Preserve your sanity and quit.

chamakits• 2 years ago

I'm not sure on hard hiring numbers; but I imagine that since Ubisoft is a French company, they have a much larger presence in France than other large studios.

unwind• 2 years ago

Meta: typo in title; last word should be "stRike" obviously.

dang3• 2 years ago

Fixed. Thranks!

lastdong• 2 years ago

This is remarkable. It's terrible to see how in some creative industries the workforce is managed, with hiring and firing practices. However, it would be great if the industry could adopt a more sustainable approach that benefits both the employees and the company's growth in the long run.

johnnyanmac7• 2 years ago

I don't want to be crude, but the sustainable approach is accepting that a company won't grow every year for forever. When did the behavior of the stock market become so fixated on this? Was it always this way?

In this case it's even simpler: Ubisoft literally didn't want to pay a CoL adjustment raise this year. Nor last year. Despite reporting better than average earnings. But because this is the EU section they can't do a mass layoff like they have and will do for the US/CA studios. So... Don't shortchange talent less money despite earning the company more money and having more experience in operating your products

adamlarsson786• 2 years ago

I don't want to be crude, but the sustainable approach is accepting that a company won't grow every year for forever

No necessarily. An economy can be sustainable even if all companies grow all the time. You just need to allow that companies fold now and then and close down. Then the market place opens space for remaining or new companies to grow. This is not just fantasy, it's how you keep cleaning up. (It does not imply that the economy as a whole keeps growing. That's a different matter altogether.)

Nature works like this too, by the way. Go to tour nearest forest, all plants keep growing as long as they are alive. But they have a limited lifetime and are broken down once they die. Which allows new ones to flurish (and grow).

n3storm• 2 years ago

People is delusional thinking the world has to be as it is, big companies can do what they want with our earth resources, workers are just competitors in a race to get a economy class seat to paradise, other countries are just unintelligent cheapo workforce and/or enemies, money is the only possible humanity ruler.

Raed6673• 2 years ago

Around 2020, I interviewed with them for a full-stack role in Montpellier France.

They genuinely seemed perplexed when I laughed at their €38k offer, which translates to ~€2200/month after taxes.

Full support to the strikers!

gambiting4• 2 years ago

I used to work at Ubisoft until recently and our recruitment was genuinely surprised why we can't find any candidates for senior C++ programmer roles offering the equivalent of about €50-60k/year.

dijit7• 2 years ago

Worked for Ubisoft in Sweden as a senior infrastructure engineer for an always online title.

One of two people to make the entirety of online work- which, if it didnt meant nobody could play.

They offered 29k SEK/mo- which isn't just below average salary for that position, it is below the average salary in the city.

I negotiated for a better pay but it took 6 years to get back to my pre-join salary.

I only took the job because the alternative was King and I didn't think candy crush was ethical.

benhurmarcel• 2 years ago

In France that’s a pretty normal salary for an engineering graduate with a Masters and no experience outside of internships.

Raed6673• 2 years ago

This was with ~ 3 or 4 years of XP. It was lower than my salary at the time.

Ubisoft Employees In France have gone on a Strike

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