What’s the secret of every creative industry? The crunch time exploitation.
Creative people will do anything to get an opportunity to create. Working in a bank is death. The drone life is death. Boredom kills. The clock is your mortal enemy.
But get close to the creative life, the artist and the art, the video game and the code, the music and the groove, and it’s like a glimpse of the promised land for most creatives. They will do anything to get there. Including work themselves to death.
‘Three out of four game developers still work crunch time, or extended hours, according to new data from the latest International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Developer Satisfaction Survey (DSS). And of those, about a third do not receive paid overtime for their work.’
I grew up with crunch. I once worked at an opera company. The deadline was 6000 people in white tails and feather boas showing up to see the opera. The seats were sold. The money spent on lavish sets. The lavish sets custom built by hand. Only a handful of people had the skill. We worked and slept in the building for weeks.
One night we had a party in the lower lobby. They had to keep us working, so they thought to feed us. A young lady named Mary was past exhaustion. She decided to drive home for a shower and a nap. The next day she didn’t show up for work. She had disappeared. A week later they found her car at the bottom of a pond. She had fallen asleep at the wheel, driven into the water and drowned.
‘People can’t sustain insane hours for a long period of time …. it’s not healthy, and it does erode productivity and morale. And yes, there are companies that exploit workers. If you’re in that situation I’d encourage you to get out.’ Instigators
Crunch happens in film, television, video games, but also sports, journalism, advertising, any industry with clients to satisfy and deadlines to meet. Is it always a bad thing?
I worked at companies where our best ideas came at crunch time. The most challenging part of any creative process is making decisions. There are a million paths to chose. Which way to go? Which art is best? What’s the best line of copy? No time left forces you to make choices, and in those situations, you’ll go with your gut. Crunch time helps ditch the indecision.
‘Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.’
Don Marquis
I wouldn’t say in and of itself crunch time is a bad thing. A period of hard crunch needs reset and rest. Brains shut down without enough sleep, so good managers will always balance crunch time with time off. Bad managers are the problem.
Every day can’t be a crisis. Flying by the seat of your pants is not a reliable growth tactic. Workers will burn out. Workers will become angry. Productivity will fall. Decent managers will employ crunch time when the time comes, but they also negotiate with workers to bring them into an agreement with the need for the extra work. After all, everybody needs to pay rent and put food on the table and paychecks are a big part of that plan.
In some companies, crunch time is a way of life and workers agreeing to that is as much a contributory factor as anything. But even in that situation, managers must step back and question the endless months of crunch time.
Work addicts thrive in high-pressure jobs. Is it a deadline or a craving driving the managers to crunch the workforce?
I’ve never actually worked without crunch time in my life. But usually, compensation has been generous for me to put in the ridiculous hours to hit milestones. But there was something else on my mind about crunch time that got me thinking about this subject.
Recently, I attended a conference about economic growth in emerging markets, and it got me thinking about the most insidious use of crunch time: Exploitation.
‘Outsourcing has been a conscious strategy of capitalists, a powerful weapon against union organization, repressing wages and intensifying exploitation of workers at home, and has led above all to a huge expansion in the employment of workers in low-wage countries.’
As the 21st century unfolds we’re witnessing the growth of new kind of imperialism, not one designed to strip mine resources of nations, but one set to mine for profit. Michael Roberts went on to write:
‘In 2010, 79 percent, or 541 million, of the world’s industrial workers lived in “less developed regions,” up from 34 percent in 1950 and 53 percent in 1980, compared to the 145 million industrial workers, or 21 percent of the total, who in 2010 lived in the imperialist countries (p103). For workers in manufacturing industry, this shift is more dramatic still. Now 83 percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce lives and works in the nations of the Global South.’
We’ve been living in a raging global economy, and the winners are companies that navigate the lanes of international commerce, routes to the south leading to manufacturing and routes to the north leading to the sale of goods manufactured by these low wage workers. Michael Roberts again:
‘The world’s “economically active population” (EAP) grew from 1.9 billion in 1980 to 3.1 billion in 2006, a 63 percent increase. Almost all of this numerical growth has occurred in the “emerging nations,” now home to 84 percent of the global workforce,1.6 billion of whom worked for wages.’
These companies are arriving from the north bearing gifts of jobs in places where jobs are desperately needed. The companies are not building classic sweatshop models because some of these emerging nations have highly educated and trained workers eager to flex their creative muscle.
Governments seek out investment. Companies are built. A new competitive class of worker is born.
Many questions arise. What does crunch time mean in these new economies? As global markets flatten out are managers now expecting a general reduction of wages north and south while crunch time becomes the norm? Wages have been stagnant for decades in the north. Wages have been rising in the south. But will the eventual middle be equal ground? Or is the middle being defined by this generation of companies as the new normal where exploitation of workers is their daily fare and a work day is whatever a work day needs to be for profit?
Creative industries have always been defined by a certain madness for perfection. It’s a self-imposed tyranny of work. But match that passion with exploitive economies and a different type of ugliness arises.
‘Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.’
Marilyn Monroe.
Building an expectation of crunch time into productivity timelines, an assumption workers will do the time with little benefit, and no compensation is perhaps the most horrendous of business models, and yet it is prevalent in creative industries worldwide. The demise of unions, health benefits, 401k savings plans, profit sharing, overtime, matched with the newly minted competitive workforces of emerging economies is leading us straight to a massive crisis in labor.
Our current course is unsustainable. History proves it. The question is, do we stay this course, bank what cash we can and deal with it later? Or do we take advantage of new technologies and production methods to retire crunch time once and for all?
‘If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.’
Karl Marx
The demonization of Marx by western political systems have made him a lightning rod, but nobody more deeply examined the worker and his work. Contemporary companies have opportunities before them that are mind-boggling regarding how work gets done and how people live their lives. We can create dynamic work environments both respectful and productive. We’re right on the cusp of a truly meaningful worker’s revolution in what work means in a person’s life.
New models of work are taking root. Time is now recognized as a person’s greatest asset. The freedom to spend that time and shape that time is something companies are embracing. Human resources are now a critical part of every thriving company culture.
In a more common expression that might mean riding scooters through the hallways. In more sophisticated ways that might mean empowering workers to join in a company crunch or give it a skip without penalty. Or simply going old school and adequately compensating crunch time work. Because working for extra bucks has always been a great motivator to get that extra ounce of performance out of a worker.
‘Please Sir, I want some more.’
Charles Dickens
When you read a Dickens’ novel, there’s always layers of smoke and distress in peoples lives. The poor house looms like a giant body suck under every step. Workers keep their heads down and only raise their voices at their peril. Victorian England was a time of great productivity. And it was paid for by an awful consequence to the health and welfare of the working class. It led directly to a century of unrest.
Let’s not repeat that history. Maybe it’s time to retire workforce staples like crunch time across all industries, creative and elsewhere. We have new ideas for work. It’s time to deploy them fully across all workforces, north, and south.
AI will not be a march of robots taking over the world, but a vista of opportunity to change the way we feel about work and the way we bring work into our lives. Cities will continue to attract and compete for talent on a global scale. Freelance opportunities will attract a majority of workers allowing them to operate and negotiate time in empowering ways. Education models will evolve to shape workforce abilities, explicitly tailored to disciplines with open resources available globally to workers no matter their location or income.
Companies that employ legions of creative workers have the key to all this. What motivates dedication in a video game studio or on a movie set is a passion for the work. It is a great privilege to pursue a passion, and creative workers put result above all else. Any dedicated creative will tell you the idea is to break through to new ground and that won’t happen without profound challenges to yourself and your team.
But that’s not crunch time. Crunch time is exploitation of worker’s passions for profit. And that is too prevalent across the board in many industries. That is what must change. And that is what we have in power to change.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Peter Drucker
The winners of the future will see the opportunities. You can spot them now. They’re companies where people want to work, where executives are liked, and results are first-rate. There are a million subtle ways to build a company culture that flourishes no matter how intense the pressure to perform becomes, but it all begins with a single word — respect.
