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This headline is almost incoherent, I wish they'd stop teaching journalists about newspaper shorthand headlines. We're not limited to broadleaf sized headlines any more, just put some fucking words in there so it makes sense.
Yes, even just the first paragraph makes sense.
Staff members were told of GAME's impending change to force staff onto zero hours contracts, first reported yesterday by Eurogamer, via mass video calls held on Microsoft Teams.
I have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn't my first language), but good to know that that's not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn't help. I just give up and let it go.
It’s honestly a problem for native speakers. So many times headlines make no sense or are extremely misleading.
I read the article and it's not really any more clear.
I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?
Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
But at the same time, it's intuitively and entirely understandable.
Who? GAME staff
What? Discovered something
What exactly? That they're moving to zero hour contracts
How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call
Or, written together, the title up above. And that's a completely normal sentence structure, it's essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start ("Via a mass microsoft teams call...").
What exactly? That they're moving to zero hour contracts
This isnt what the headline says though. "Discovered zero hour contracts" isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.
You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your "its simple" added details that weren't there originally.
See? I understood it that GAME staff discovered that zero hours contracts (whatever that is) move via team calls (wherever, and however that happens).
So much to reading comprehension. That title is trash.
I just find it weird that you felt compelled to post an explanation for something that is "intuitively and entirely understandable". It's almost as if you knew that lots of people couldn't understand it.
Sure, but while I understand the sentence structure I still don't know what it's talking about without the article itself
I think the point they are making is that we use these short titles even though we don't need to. It might be correct, but why not make better use of the medium
American here, what's a "zero hour contract"?
You're an employee but not guaranteed to work any hours at all?
Yep, exactly that. There are laws that say if you work more than a certain number of hours per week, you're entitled to benefits like pension, paid holiday, etc. Zero hours contracts let companies get away with not providing those, as they'll keep each individual staff member below the required hours, because there's no guarantee of a minimum number of hours in their contract.
It's absolutely atrocious, but the government spins it to make it sound like a benefit by saying you have extra time, you can lead a flexible life. What it means in reality for most people is that they need multiple jobs and still get no benefits that a full time job would provide.
In America it's called "Full Time" vs "Part Time".
Full Time is generally 35 to 40 hours, benefits like sick pay, vacation pay, 401K, etc.
Anything under 35 is Part Time, no benefits. But you can still be guaranteed hours up to 35, generally 20.
I don't know of anyone here who would take a 0 hour job, unless it were a "no show job". But that's a different deal. ;)
We have part-time jobs as well, but those usually come with a minimum number of hours. Zero hours contracts were brought in to bypass those rules. Since zero hours contracts came in, part-time contracts practically disappeared.
Ah, modern slavery. Zero hours contracts should be banned. Anyone thinking about offering you one, should be poofed out of existence
should be poofed out of existence
This means something very specific in the UK.
You can't just drop that and then not explain....
Pretty sure they’re referring to “poof” which is a derogatory term for a gay man in British vernacular. In any case, the context in which it was used clearly wasn’t intended as the derogatory term, rather to mean “suddenly”.
There is legitimate use cases for a zero hour contract. The vast majority don't fit it.
If the zero hour contract minimum wage was £50 per hour, then it would be appropriate. This would still allow it to be useful to hire consultant, semi- retired experts and contractors and use PAYE, no additional companies, accountants etc. Very efficient and would only apply to employees with some power in the relationship with the business.
However, it's used to exploit minimum or low wage staff. The company takes all the flexibility it offers and uses it to bully the employee into accepting the hours the business wants. They do this by treating to cut hours if the employee doesn't agree. This makes it difficult to have multiple jobs to make up the hours.
Depends on the terms!
I work four jobs, all freelance, all paid sufficiently and all zero hour.
Suits me really well, as the work comes and goes between the different roles I've always got something to do.
It's the exploitation of them that's the problem. It's the way they're used to make people disposable and bypass employment laws that's the problem.
It's a bad thing, to be sure, but it's just not anything like slavery.
yeah, people treated their slaves much better.
Did I miss a /s? Because at face value, that's utter bollocks (since we're talking about the UK).
I mean, I worked at GAME over a couple of decades ago as a teenager and they were using zero hour (and near-zero) contracts back then.
Surprising they ever stopped tbh, awful company even before Mike Ashley got it from the bargain bin.
gamers rise up
That's legal? Can a contract be changed willy nilly in the US like that? In the EU it's a least a month's notice and in some EU countries even 3 months notice!
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Read the article. It's the UK (which still has most EU employment law active). Now, I don't think it's illegal to do what they're doing. Effectively, I can bet I know exactly how they're framing this, and it'll be totally legal.
The calls were almost certainly initiating the redundancy process. That is, technically EVERYONE (probably below management) is being made redundant. As part of the redundancy process, an employer is expected to attempt to find internal opportunities for the employees to be culled, and this new position is what they are likely offering as said opportunity. I suspect this is working around a bit of a grey area in redundancy law. But, I don't think they're falling foul of any law. But, I'm not a legal expert.
So, at the end of the required redundancy period (it varies based on employment duration) they will either be let go (with whatever statutory redundancy pay they're owed) or re-employed under the new zero hours contract.
Personally, I think this has the potential to blow up in their face a bit. It's not allowed in the UK to employ someone on a zero-hour contract and not allow them to work elsewhere. Such a clause in a contract may be ignored. Now, this could well mean they say "Oh we need you on Wednesday" and you say "Well, actually I've already agreed a shift elsewhere on Wednesday" and there's really not much they can do about it. I also hope the people working there just move on.
The worst thing that can happen is that the parent company benefits from this. It'll just make other retail companies do the same in a race to the bottom.
Read the article. It’s the UK
Yes, made very clear in the article, thank you.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Well, in the first line they reference an article from yesterday which made it very clear.
I'm not too sure why the response was so defensive. That point made up a miniscule part of my overall comment and wasn't even close to the primary subject matter.
OK buddy, I'll leave you to your online persona :)
Are we really not going to talk about how the website is EURO gamer?
Yes, EURO gamer only reports on European companies and European games and European hardware. They'd never report on US companies ever.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Saw that response coming. I'm just saying maybe don't assume everything is American before asking a question like that, and especially don't do it for a website with "euro" in the name
Lmao, most workers in the US don't have a contract at all. They're under a system called "At Will Employment" that was part of breaking the Unions. They can quit at any time, but they can also be fired at any time, for nearly anything. (It can't be discrimination, but it could be the color of the shirt you wore that day)
So yeah the terms of your employment in the US can change at any time.
Totally off topic but what is that "Anti Commercial AI thingy" that you have linked? Is it to prevent AI scraping?
That's precisely it. Maybe I should add a blurb about that 🤔 (for later)
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip
sleep 0.2
(echo ' spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy
[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
```bash'
cat "$0"
echo '```
:::') | xclip -selection clipboard
xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"
:::