We are once again relaying a communiqué written by our fellow strikers from the Parisian studio Eugen Systems. You can support them through their strike fund, all participations are welcome : https://www.lepotcommun.fr/pot/kfy5g3ta

They confirmed their strike continues on Thursday 22 February.

[Version française]

Still Division

We have been on strike for a week now.

Every day we receive messages of support from players and people working in the industry, from France and abroad. They remind us that the problems we are currently concerned with are not restricted to our company but are much more common, even if the symptoms may differ. We are very moved by these messages that give meaning to the struggle we are forced to wage today. Nor do we forget the people who are currently experiencing similar situations in other industries or in the public sector.

Our demands are about the application of law, especially concerning our salaries. But the problems we face seem to be rooted in a deeper phenomenon: a lack of appreciation for the work we do every day. All of us would seemingly be perfectly replaceable tools. Our know-how, experience, qualities and qualifications are obviously parameters that shouldn’t be taken into account.

Yet who designs games, creates them, enriches them with content, and ensures they function properly?

At this time, we have yet to receive any kind of response or proposal from the management of Eugen Systems.
We regret that they continue to bury their faces in the sand after fifteen months of desperate attempts to draw attention to the seriousness of the problems we face and the need to find a solution that also takes into account the interests of employees, not just those of management. When these solutions involve an unilateral reduction in wages, a second-guessing of the grades and qualifications of employees, or the negation of essential elements of their employment contracts, they are obviously unacceptable.

As we told our studio management earlier this week, we are not taking any pleasure in the fire that occurred in the building housing the company’s premises, which brought production to a halt. Our strike carries on nonetheless and we are still waiting for our demands to be met, which, let us not forget, are nothing extraordinary: the fair appreciation of our work and the consideration of our legal and contractual rights.

 

Eugen Systems strike workers

We relay a statement from our colleagues on strike at Eugen Systems, the studio from Paris.

EDIT : a strike fund has been setup, all participations are welcome: https://www.lepotcommun.fr/pot/kfy5g3ta

Act of Strike

On this February 14 th 2018, we, 21 employees of Eugen Systems, decided to go on strike. On this date we might be tempted to say that we preferred to flatter the loved one instead of going to our workplace as it should be. This is not the case, even if we are animated by a certain passion, it is actually tinged with fury.

We have been discussing serious violations of our rights with management for almost 15 months now. Like anyone else in our place, we assumed that dialogue and reason would be more effective than direct confrontation. After all, an employer should be able to understand that the law is what it is, and that it is legitimate for its employees to demand that it be enforced, including for their benefit. Faced with the wall that was set up against us during the first six months of negotiations, we were forced to call in a lawyer to remind our employer of the law. To remind that minimum wages are not subject to negotiation and that neither are our qualifications, our employment contracts, or the law. These demands are far from unacceptable. For every answer we were given promises, “everything will be settled” we were told. Naive as we are, we believed it.

Even more naively, we continued to believe in it for many more months, but on the morning of February the 14th we came to realise an obvious fact that no longer escaped anybody: enough is enough.

When we arrived at the office, each of us discovered several e-mails on our professional mailboxes: first of all a collective e-mail indicating that our overtime, which had not been paid up until then, a contentious subject since the beginning, was absent from our pay slips only because of the fault of our two successive payroll managers. In short, what we considered as an infringement of our rights is now presented to us as an administrative error. As a result, our gross salaries have been reduced so that our overtime can be justified without even regularizing our situations by a penny. Even though these new gross salaries are considered to be below the legal minimums for several employees.

Additionnally, several employees were notified in another e-mail that the conditions specifically mentioned in their employment contract, as well as in the collective agreement, were not recognized as legitimate by management. The latter justifiying not granting them the grades, salaries and associated benefits. What a joy, for example, for a developer with several years of experience and an engineer’s job, to arrive one morning and see that he now has the status and rank of a technician, with the lowered salary accompanying it.

This new evasive maneuver from management has inflamed the situation: in the face of the refusal to pay us as required by law, and the manifest lack of consideration for the value of our work, we have come to the conclusion that, in order to make ourselves heard, we have no option but to go on strike.

We did not want the conflict, and we were even prepared to accept a number of compromises. But in the face of such a lack of respect, all that remains is to make use of our most fundamental rights, which, if we fail to resolve all the problems we are confronted with, will hopefully have the merit ofdrawing the attention of players, public opinion or elected representatives to the catastrophic situation in the industry for which we are working.

 

The striking employees of Eugen Systems, who if it needs to be reminded are not NPCs