For many of us, working at Nintendo sounds like the dream job.
Current Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser has insisted, as we noted in a recent
video on delays, that the company has a responsibility to care for its workers, saying, quote, “We
need to make sure that our employees have good work-life balance.”
Reports from current and former workers at Nintendo of America, though, suggest that
life at the company is not as much fun as Bowser would have us believe.
Among the many accusations levied against Nintendo are claims that the company is withholding
permanent employment from its staff, increasing workloads for those who are employed, and
even firing workers who publicly discuss unionisation.
Nintendo of America denies these reports, but a brief look at the company’s Glassdoor
reviews suggest that these issues are widespread enough that a significant portion of the workforce
feel disgruntled and under pressure.
Meanwhile, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has been quick to decry the
accusations, stating, quote: “The reports I hear really strike me as just not the company
I knew…
What's being described does not seem like a healthy culture.”
Complaints frequently reference Nintendo’s two-tiered working environment.
Permanent employees wear red or gold Nintendo badges, and have unfettered access to the
on-site café, enjoy an annual bonus each year, and are invited to social events.
The rest of the workers at Nintendo of America are blue badge-wearing temporary contractors,
hired for an eleven month period, with a forced break of two months in between each contract.
This break in the contract gives Nintendo the legal right to deny temporary workers
the employment benefits afforded to others.
According to IGN: “The words ‘second-class citizens’ are
regularly used to describe employees who carry a blue badge instead of a red or gold badge,
and they frequently feel unwelcome even setting foot in Nintendo's glittering headquarters
to travel in groups through the main lobby, or staying too long in Cafe Mario.”
One temporary worker, Jelena Džamonja, described to Kotaku a time when this rigid system negatively
impacted her health: “It was an icy day in an unusually snowy
January when she says she slipped and hit her head while walking to work.
She didn’t think anything of it at first, but by the time she was in the office she
had trouble reading and started to worry she’d suffered a concussion.
Fortunately, there was an onsite clinic in her building.
“But when she went to visit for a checkup she says they turned her away because she
wasn’t a full-time employee and wasn’t part of the Nintendo health insurance plan.
She decided to ask a coworker to drive her to a nearby urgent care facility instead.
That didn’t work either.
The colleague was a full-time Nintendo employee.
Since as a contract hire Džamonja was technically employed by Parker Staffing, she said she
was told it was against company policy for her colleague to drive her off-site.”
Another worker, Jenn, spoke to IGN about the pressures she felt as a temporary worker with
mounting responsibilities but no benefits: “Toward the end I was managing a team of
13 people during a product launch, acting as a chat lead, publishing knowledge base
articles on WiFi for not just Wii but Wii U and Switch,’ she says.
‘I was doing forum moderation and was a forum lead at that point and had written documentation
for it.
On top of that I was still expected to take chats and take calls.
And I was looking around wondering, ‘Why am I not a red badge?’”
Jenn noted that, as a transgender woman, even being allowed to participate in Nintendo’s
contingent of a Pride parade was a hard sell.
She said: “My manager at the time actually asked about
it and took it to a fight with upper management, and that is the only time I’ve ever seen
where [workers] were allowed to mingle with [employees] was the Pride parade.
Because he had fought for it, and he had fought for that hard apparently.”
Apparently things are also becoming more stressful for full-time employees.
An anonymous source told IGN: “It just seemed like the full-time staff
was almost drowning all the time.
They didn’t hire enough full-time people, so full-time people just ended up managing
more and more contractors, getting more and more bogged down, and there was this bottleneck...
That’s how contractors end up training each other, because the full-time staff is just
buried.”
Workers’ comments suggest that this attitude within Nintendo of America is partially a
legacy issue – one of the quirks of being the Western arm of a rigid, [old] Japanese
company.
Reggie Fils-Aime said that when he was first interviewed for a position within Nintendo,
he asked the head of Human Resources about upskilling and upward mobility within the
company.
He said: “And his answer to me was, ‘Reggie, we
don’t do that here.’
I’m taken aback and he continues, ‘Japanese parent, our parent doesn’t believe in this,
therefore we don’t implement it.’”
That said, workers have noted that things have been getting worse since around half
way through the 2010s, at a time of upheaval for Nintendo.
Apparently, the culture began to shift following the poor performance of the Wii U, the loss
of president Satoru Iwata, and the departure of Reggie Fils-Aime.
Said Fils-Aime: “In the end, I judge my legacy by that when
I retired, as well as the head of HR who I had that initial lunch with… he and I retired
the same day.
And as we retired, we promoted people internally into a variety of different roles versus bringing
people in from the outside.
To me that was a testament that we had done a great job of improving and growing the culture
at Nintendo of America.”
Reports suggest that current Nintendo worker do not feel that the culture within the company
is quite as healthy now as Fils-Aime remembers.
While issues of this nature are often nuanced, and we don’t know all the details and should
be careful about jumping to conclusions, it doesn’t sound like working at Nintendo is
quite the dream job that many people imagine it to be.
According to a report by Axios Gaming, an internal memo from Doug Bowser claims that
the higher-ups within the company are reflecting on the situation.
Bowser is quoted as saying: “Like many of you, the executive leadership
team and I find many of these points troubling, and we are closely reviewing the content.
… “[Nintendo has] zero-tolerance for inappropriate
conduct, including harassment, discrimination or intimidation.”
Axios notes that at least one source said the message was disappointing, as it didn’t
actually address the issue surrounding contractors.
Nintendo’s full response to this scandal has yet to be revealed, and it remains to
be seen what moves the company will take as a result of complaints.
For the most part, though, there is one thing that contractors at Nintendo continue to praise
about the experience of working for the company: the staff themselves.
Glassdoor reviews and IGN’s report alike make it clear that the people who actually
work for the company are lovely, and do their best to support each other even in the midst
of a challenging environment.
The problem is not the people themselves, but the systems that create undue pressure
by discriminating between workers in an often arbitrary manner.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that a good or bad system of management can make all the
difference for the people who are trapped in any social environment.