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Following a union-busting complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board, a host of other Nintendo of America contract workers have spoke to Kotaku about various issues they’ve dealt with while working at Nintendo.

While Nintendo has their own full-time employees, they also utilize contract workers, hired through third parties, to aid in a number of areas. These contract workers are involved with product testing, customer service, and a number of other departments. As these are contract workers, they do not receive health insurance from Nintendo. A handful of these contract workers have also stated that they believe it’s hard, or near impossible to promoted to a full-time employee at Nintendo.

In Kotaku’s report, a number of different current and former contract workers share complaints about their work environment at Nintendo. It seems that some employees have received reprimands from their contractors after they aired grievances, concerns, and other thoughts in open meetings. The contractors would tell these workers that they shouldn’t bring up these kind of issues during open meetings, and should instead talk to them directly to raise concerns.

Some of these contract workers also feel that issues aren’t properly handled when dealing with the contract worker, as they’re acting as a go-between with Nintendo. Either Nintendo isn’t getting the full story on what’s actually happening when a grievance is aired, or the contractors are misconstruing what Nintendo says, which results in a mishandling of the situation.

To get a better idea of what exactly some contract workers are experiencing, and also learn about their frustrations, read Kotaku’s full piece here.

[Kotaku]

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Comments (5)

mike_intellivision

2y ago

Two quick thoughts.

1. This is unfortunate.
2. This is the way almost every large company (or organization) operates.

In other words, I am not condoning what Nintendo is doing. But those who think that it is something isolated to Nintendo are delusional.


thekeeseeffect

2y ago

A lot of this sounds like pretty run of the mill large company management headaches. Not really nefarious, just the typical struggles of large numbers of people trying to work together. I hope, if anything, Nintendo sees these complaints and tries to improve their corporate structure.


bakfug

2y ago

Having done my own fair share of contract work, both through a third party agency and directly to a company, this is just how corporate America is.

And as much as i dont care to side with corporate america, most of this sounds really tame and just people complaining that they are knowingly overstepping their boundaries or upset there wasn't an opportunity they thought they'd be given.


nin2000

2y ago

According to Spawn Wave’s News Wave, the contractor in question leaked sensitive information and was let go for that reason.


zcomuto

2y ago

I’m not entirely convinced that Nintendo would be a prime company to work for in America, this being one of many reasons. They hire a lot of contract workers internally - not jus through third parties - simply to be around paying them benefits, or just to have them then around too long. Some of their positions for roles that would usually command very high salaries at other big tech companies such as software engineering, cybersecurity or cloud engineering are often just posted as contract positions, which strikes me as fishy.