Work Conditions

Wives of employees of the gaming company Rockstar (famous for Grand Theft Auto) are protesting against the long hours that their husbands have to work. See Gamasutra.com. The Spouses wrote a letter to the managment of the company to complain about the twelve hour workdays, the regular overtime on saturday and the 70 hour workweek that is quite common at Rockstar nowadays. They even say the pressure to work even more is growing.

The workhours sound sooo familiar to an architect. Working into the night, no overtime payments, coming in on weekends to work on competitions and 70 hour workweeks are even quite common at some architectural firms. Yet i have never heard of protest of the spouses against these conditions. Why? Is it because architects have no spouse? Is it because they are architects themselves? Is it because architects do not complain, because they like architecture to much? or are the spouses just happy that there husbands are never home?

In any case according to the sources on the internet it is not the first time this happened in the gaming industry. In 2004 employees were awarded millions when a similar case against EA was brought into court.