Tecmo sued by every single employee
Tecmo is now being sued by representatives of every employee it has. Ouch.
According to Kotaku, on June 16th two Tecmo employees filed a law suit with the Tokyo District Court in a complaint over unpaid wages, demanding 8.3 million yen (around £40,000) in payment.
The lawsuit alleges that that in 2004 all the workers at Tecmo were illegally moved to a 'flexible work hours' system and that from that point onwards no overtime was ever paid to anyone. The plaintiffs in the case now officially represent all 300 Tecmo employees and allege that overtime for employees exceeded 100 hours per month, all of which was unpaid.
Tecmo developer Hiroaki Ozawa is one of the plaintiffs in the case and is also the head of a Tecmo Labour Union which is claiming that the company has produced false documents to attempt to quash this lawsuit and that important accounting documents are being deliberately hidden.
At the same time, Itagaki is alleging in his own lawsuit that promised bonuses were not paid to staff as promised and pursuing compensation on that front.
Things don't look good for Tecmo - but do you really care? Let us know in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyI'm sure thats enough to put a large hole in there wallet, but not bankrupt them.
With that money they could buy back the NG and DOA and make new ones :)
This doesn't makes sense, and I can't see the employees winning the case.
Regardless, I couldn't care less... I'm neither a fan of Ninja Gaiden nor Dead or Alive.
Not exactly. The employers were moved to a flexible work time, which would allow them to work at different times per day and a variable number of hours per day, considering they met the hours they had to per week, or whatever. This is how flexible systems work. The problem here is that, if they had to do 45 hours of work per week, employers usually worked 60 or more hours per week, and those 15+ hours went unpaid. As the article states, they were promised these hours as paid, which never happened. This, unless they had specific salary norms that stated these extra hours wouuld go unpaid (which from the news we read can be assumed it is not the case), is illegal. Thus the employers sued their company in the hopes of justice being made and them being paid the money they deserve.
No offense, but I think we should ALL care about stuff like this, not because they did this or that game that we did or did not buy, but because we're all WORKERS. Imagine that wherever you work, your bosses made a similar decision and then any extra hours or extra work that you had to do went unpaid. You wouldn't be happy about it, would ya? This kind of solution must be known by people so that nobody gets taken advantage of in their jobs. For instance, a similar thing happened in my company, we have some special rules as for extra hours that are renewed every 2-3 years. 2 years ago, the negotiations were delayed a whole year, in which we were paid with the old rules. We didn't find ourselves in the need to sue our company, because new norms were agreed and we were paid the proportional monthly salary that we were missing from the previous 12 months. THAT kind of situation, which happens more and more with today's increasingly bigger companies that don't care about their individual workers, must be known so that people who find themselves in this situations know what their options are.
Do not let big companies scare you, if you play your cards right, you will win no matter how many lawyers they bring to the table!! Law can be tricky and suck at times, but when something's done inapropriately, it's easy to prove provided you have a hefty percentage of the workers.
That depends a lot on the specific norms for salary payments in your company. Usually when you're not paid extra hours you get benefits from somewhere else. The problem with Tecmo appears to be that workers didn't get neither extra hours paid nor benefits of any other kind (I'm assuming, if not all this piece of news wouldn't make any sense). Get to know the norms in your workplace, and you'll find if you're being paid as you should or not. Note that many companies don't do all this on purpose, sometimes they know but they keep shut until you REALIZE, sometimes they don't even notice about your situation, with no bad intention at all from the beginning.
-zabe
And in Canada, you wouldn't have to sue. Just file a complaint with your provincial board of labour. Of course, you will be persona non grata on the job after that.