The ‘grey area’ of employment relations in the Polish videogame industry

Abstract

This article discusses fraudulent contracting of work in the Polish videogame industry by addressing its relation to workers’ understanding of their insecure employment and the economic risk associated with it. Fraudulent contracting of work is understood as misuse of civil law contracts/self-employment to disguise different types of employment relations. The article draws upon in-depth interviews with Polish videogame workers and key sector organisations to examine their understanding of the prevalence of employment relations not covered by the labour code in the videogame industry. The interviewees presented polarised opinions about engagement with civil law contracts ranging from celebratory approaches to their flexibility to discussing their use by companies in order to circumvent the labour code provisions. This article argues that the understanding of work precarisation needs to be further investigated in relation to national regulatory systems and workers’ understanding of their own employment arrangements.

From Passion to Compassion: A Caring Inquiry into Creative Work as Socially Engaged Art

“…Philanthropic foreign funding schemes supporting the rebuilding of civil society from the ashes of socialism compensated for state deregulation and privatization of the art world with resulting dwindling arts subsidies and vanishing public art spaces (Galliera, 2017). Deeply socialized and informal creative labour practices, often sustained in third-sector institutions and grey economies, proliferate in post-socialist creative industries as a 'survival' and 'hopeful' response to constant financial, social and economic distress (Alacovska, 2018a(Alacovska, , 2018bOzimek, 2019).…”

Pogrešna Kvalifikacija Ugovornog Odnosa : Jedan Od Brojnih Izvora Nesigurnosti Rada U Industriji Videoigara

“…Iako imaju ključnu ulogu u isporuci funkcionalnih videoigara krajnjim korisnicima, procjenjuje se da je pozicija testera ili, kako ih znanost još naziva technobeomi, odnosno mrežni robovi 53 podcijenjena i znantno nesigurnija u odnosu na druge radnike ovog sektora kreativne ekonomije. 54 Osim toga, nova ekonomija često se u teoriji smatra tzv. zonom bez sindikata.…”

Techniques of commensuration in the videogame industry

“…Recent work on game production has been marshalled under the banner of ‘game production studies’, an interdisciplinary social scientific field that ‘emphasizes the cultural, economic, political, and social circumstances in which games are created and the production cultures associated with development’ (Sotamaa and Švelch, 2021: 12). For example, work has focused on areas like the precarious nature of labour (Keogh, 2019), the political economy of software – particularly within the platform-based economy (Nieborg et al, 2020), the role of production and distribution intermediaries such as trade shows (Parker et al, 2018) and the regulatory conditions that inform game work (Ozimek, 2019b). Further to this, game production studies has been particularly attentive to the regionality of production – that is, to the specific economic, social, and regulatory contexts of production which differ markedly across the world, with work spanning regions such as China (Nakamura and Wirman, 2021), Australia (Keogh, forthcoming), Czechoslovakia (Švelch, 2018), Poland (Ozimek, 2019a) and the US (O’Donnell, 2014).…”