What Sega is doing is standard practice for the games industry. Other game and tech companies are doing this too. Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, Meta, the list goes on.
Many folks in the games industry work "contract" jobs via staffing firms, which means that they don't get the same full-time benefits as other employees in their company.
Most contract employees work on an hourly (not salary) basis. Sometimes they don't even get to take the same holidays off, or they might get less paid time off (if any, depends on the company). They are not allowed to be treated as full-time employees, and some companies treat them as second class citizens (read stories about Amazon, Meta and Google for example).
Contract employees also are usually unable to work more than 12 - 18 months on a project. This is due to a lawsuit against Microsoft years ago, who still heavily utilizes contract employees to this day. The lawsuit was brought against Microsoft because these contractors would work years on specific projects, but never be brought on as full-time
So instead of bringing these contractors on full-time, Microsoft instead restricted how many months they could work at their company at a time. For example, a contractor cannot work more than 12 - 18 months with Microsoft, and then they have to take a 6 month "break" (where they leave Microsoft), and then they can work another 12 - 18 months.
Contractors are also the first to go in most company layoffs, and the benefit (for the company) is that the company doesn't have to report contractor layoffs via the WARN Act.
This is just one example of how this industry treats employees. Salaried full-time folks are also overworked. And they don't get the benefit of overtime hours like hourly employees (most of time, depends on how you are classified as salaried).
Crunch is a huge issue, constant layoffs are a huge issue, burnout is a huge issue, etc.
These employees at Sega are very brave, as these large companies are not above union busting. I hope that they can set the stage for larger unionization efforts across the games industry as a whole.
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
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