GAME staff discovered zero hours contracts move via mass Microsoft Teams calls

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 have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn't my first language), but good to know that that's not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn't help. I just give up and let it go.

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 call

Or, 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...").

Are you paid to craft distraction posts? The headline and article are clear but your post (clearly upvoted by bots) is now the point of discussion (likely some responders are also the same bot accounts).

How much do you earn in service of corporate interests?

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.

There is legitimate use cases for a zero hour contract. The vast majority don't fit it.

If the zero hour contract minimum wage was £50 per hour, then it would be appropriate. This would still allow it to be useful to hire consultant, semi- retired experts and contractors and use PAYE, no additional companies, accountants etc. Very efficient and would only apply to employees with some power in the relationship with the business.

However, it's used to exploit minimum or low wage staff. The company takes all the flexibility it offers and uses it to bully the employee into accepting the hours the business wants. They do this by treating to cut hours if the employee doesn't agree. This makes it difficult to have multiple jobs to make up the hours.

should be poofed out of existence

This means something very specific in the UK.

Depends on the terms!

I work four jobs, all freelance, all paid sufficiently and all zero hour.

Suits me really well, as the work comes and goes between the different roles I've always got something to do.

It's the exploitation of them that's the problem. It's the way they're used to make people disposable and bypass employment laws that's the problem.

It's a bad thing, to be sure, but it's just not anything like slavery.

Read the article. It's the UK (which still has most EU employment law active). Now, I don't think it's illegal to do what they're doing. Effectively, I can bet I know exactly how they're framing this, and it'll be totally legal.

The calls were almost certainly initiating the redundancy process. That is, technically EVERYONE (probably below management) is being made redundant. As part of the redundancy process, an employer is expected to attempt to find internal opportunities for the employees to be culled, and this new position is what they are likely offering as said opportunity. I suspect this is working around a bit of a grey area in redundancy law. But, I don't think they're falling foul of any law. But, I'm not a legal expert.

So, at the end of the required redundancy period (it varies based on employment duration) they will either be let go (with whatever statutory redundancy pay they're owed) or re-employed under the new zero hours contract.

Personally, I think this has the potential to blow up in their face a bit. It's not allowed in the UK to employ someone on a zero-hour contract and not allow them to work elsewhere. Such a clause in a contract may be ignored. Now, this could well mean they say "Oh we need you on Wednesday" and you say "Well, actually I've already agreed a shift elsewhere on Wednesday" and there's really not much they can do about it. I also hope the people working there just move on.

The worst thing that can happen is that the parent company benefits from this. It'll just make other retail companies do the same in a race to the bottom.

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?