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News Sega of America to lay off 61 employees

PixelKnight

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www.gamesindustry.biz

Sega of America to lay off 61 employees

Update: The Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega reacted on social media, confirming this is related to the previously…
www.gamesindustry.biz www.gamesindustry.biz

Chose this source as it has a comment from their union:


"Through our union efforts, we’ve been able to more than double the number of saved jobs, and to offer severance to our temp workers," the union said. "This, however, does not take away from the fact that many of our coworkers are being laid off in a decision we believe will have a negative impact on the working conditions of those who remain with the company, and in the quality of our future games.
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Original story credit (via NintendoLife)
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice was submitted earlier this month on 8th January in Orange County, California, and was flagged by the Twitter account @WhatLayoff (via GamesIndustry.biz).
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WARN notices are mandatory in the US for companies of over 100 employees, requiring 60 days notice of redundancies, plant closures etc.
 
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Dardan Sandiego said:
Christ, it's not stopping.
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While gross incompetence of management ruining lives like Embracer is one thing, this seems slightly different in its malice in that it’s Sega hitting back at unionisation attempts to protect vulnerable temp workers by… laying off those workers. But yeah, the whole trend is grim
 
Fucked how I read this and went "wow that's the least amount of people getting fired I've seen all year." In a terribly weird way it's almost refreshing to see that at least it's not in the hundreds.
I hope the people affected find jobs again soon, as always. The fact this comes down to Sega fighting against their unionizing workers is awful.
 
JazzyFuture said:
Fucked how I read this and went "wow that's the least amount of people getting fired I've seen all year." In a terribly weird way it's almost refreshing to see that at least it's not in the hundreds.
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Same, what a rotten industry.
 
JazzyFuture said:
Fucked how I read this and went "wow that's the least amount of people getting fired I've seen all year." In a terribly weird way it's almost refreshing to see that at least it's not in the hundreds.
I hope the people affected find jobs again soon, as always. The fact this comes down to Sega fighting against their unionizing workers is awful.
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I am pissed at myself that that's the same way I read it. You know things are bad when you're making those internal compromises.
 
I tend to have an apathetic reaction to layoffs these days, not because they aren’t fucking horrible, but just because they’ve become so frequent now that I can’t help but think “Gee really? The gaming industry is still shit? Shocker I say!”

Not trying to be insensitive, just making a point about how infuriatingly common this has become.
New day, new layoffs!

chocolate_supra said:
So isn't retaliating against employees for unionizing pretty dang illegal? Could Sega get in trouble for this?
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Unfortunately no, they won’t.
 
chocolate_supra said:
So isn't retaliating against employees for unionizing pretty dang illegal? Could Sega get in trouble for this?
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No, they can lay people off for no reason if they wish to. A union contract is just that, a contract. It will contain all the entitlements that are agreed upon between the union and the company, but the employer always reserves the right to eliminate positions. Workers can file a grievance with their Union if the employer is not adhering to the agreed worker conditions. For example, the union contract "should" include what the acceptable level of production from the employees. Basically, there needs to be objective measurable criteria by which employees are graded. For example, if you work for a shipping company like UPS, as a package delivery driver there is an agreed upon way in which they calculate how many deliveries the driver should be able to complete in their shift. It may be 180 stops in considered eight hours of work, they can give that driver 220 stops, but that will be considered ten hours of work. What the employer cant do is let go of 20% of their drivers and then demand that their drivers do the 220 stops in eight hours. Now if UPS were to start losing customers and no longer consistently has a full days worth of work for each driver, they could absolutely layoff some of the drivers and spread out that work load amongst the remaining drivers, so long as it doesn't exceed the agree upon maximum work load per day.
 
Goodtwin said:
No, they can lay people off for no reason if they wish to. A union contract is just that, a contract. It will contain all the entitlements that are agreed upon between the union and the company, but the employer always reserves the right to eliminate positions. Workers can file a grievance with their Union if the employer is not adhering to the agreed worker conditions. For example, the union contract "should" include what the acceptable level of production from the employees. Basically, there needs to be objective measurable criteria by which employees are graded. For example, if you work for a shipping company like UPS, as a package delivery driver there is an agreed upon way in which they calculate how many deliveries the driver should be able to complete in their shift. It may be 180 stops in considered eight hours of work, they can give that driver 220 stops, but that will be considered ten hours of work. What the employer cant do is let go of 20% of their drivers and then demand that their drivers do the 220 stops in eight hours. Now if UPS were to start losing customers and no longer consistently has a full days worth of work for each driver, they could absolutely layoff some of the drivers and spread out that work load amongst the remaining drivers, so long as it doesn't exceed the agree upon maximum work load per day.
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"For no reason" is one thing, I get that (and I appreciate the details). But I mean if Sega threatened to lay people off in retaliation for unionizing, then the people unionize and Sega does it, isn't that illegal? To retaliate against employees for unionizing?
 
chocolate_supra said:
"For no reason" is one thing, I get that (and I appreciate the details). But I mean if Sega threatened to lay people off in retaliation for unionizing, then the people unionize and Sega does it, isn't that illegal? To retaliate against employees for unionizing?
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When you take something to court, its all about what you can prove. Just because there appears to be an obvious connection between the two, if you cant prove it, even if it seems obvious, then you cant win the case. I'm also not confident that there is any law that treats this scenario as a form of discrimination. Even if there is, then you would come back to proving that these individuals were singled out because not everyone who joined the union was terminated. I'm sure Sega would say that they streamlined various positions to improve profitability of the company, something that they are fully entitled to do. There is a difference between being laid off and being fired. If you are fired, the employer is required to provide justification for doing so. If you are laid off, they do not have to provide justification, but I believe they are prohibited from replacing you with a new employee for the same position for around two years.

The reality is companies rarely if ever choose to have a union workforce, it is always forced upon them, so its natural for them to have some hard feelings about it when it first happens. People do need to remember that businesses are in business to make money, this is why they exist. They do not exist to provide you or anyone else employment, that is simply a byproduct of them wanting to make money. Nobody starts a business with the goal of offering employment to a certain number of people, they start a business because they think they have a product or service that they can sell. If it becomes popular enough, they ultimately need to hire people because they cannot facilitate the demand for their product or service by themselves. It grows from there. Some businesses stay small and some become Amazon, but they all started out with the same purpose.

Edit:
I live in Ohio, so things are different in others states and obviously other countries.
 
The Fed isn't going to tone down the interest rate, so these scenarios should sadly keep playing out throughout the year. In terms of a macroeconomic level, the conditions are there for the decisions of incompetent executives to keep being passed on to the employees.
 
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