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 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 callOr, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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"
