Taking one for the team you've been kicked out of | Last Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Regular readers may be familiar with our This Week in Business column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a bit of opinion.

Last week's column had more than a bit of opinion, as it was pushing 5,000 words and still didn't cover everything we wanted.

To remedy the situation, we're running an addendum today discussing a subject we couldn't squeeze into last week's column: a lawsuit filed against Electronic Arts by seven former BioWare Edmonton employees who said the severance they were offered fell far short of what they should have received.

Alberta's Employment Standards Code only mandates eight weeks of pay for employees who work 10 years or longer for the same company, but there is no shortage of lawfirms drumming up business by citing common law standards that can get employees considerably more.

Those common law standards generally take into account things like the overall health of the economy and how difficult it will be for the laid off people to find new work. With apologies to the Alberta game development scene, I'm guessing some of these ex-BioWare developers are going to have to leave the province to find a new gig, if not the country. Toss in the fact that the entire games industry seems to be on a firing spree right now, and these factors would suggest the laid off employees could get considerably more in severance than the Employment Standards Code strictly requires.

As for how much, their lawyers believe it should be about one month of severance per year of service. With the seven former employees averaging 14 years of tenure at BioWare, that's a significant amount of financial security hanging in the balance.

I fully admit that 14 months of severance sounds cushy.