Employer thinks it would be fun to ‘reward’ its workers with extra shifts for humiliating themselves on social media

“Dance, monkey! DANCE!”.

You can almost hear the sketchy executives at America’s bargain basement game’s store chuckling this mantra as they chug the Kool-Aid. It’s a piss-poor move from GameStop higher-ups, who come across like they’re trying to exploit their workforce, having roped them into a daft dance-off to ‘earn’ the privilege.

Here’s the context – GameStop invited its employees to make dance videos with the promise of special prizes for the best routines, that include extra work hours during Black Friday shopping week. To be fair, extra hours on low-hour contracts can be a good thing if you want to maximise your pay at a busy time – many of us know the deal here, having done similar retail jobs in our youth. However, pay for your worked hours seems to function differently in the US (more on that later).

The internal communications message said “Be creative, rope in your team, and have fun with it! Don’t worry, you can’t look as bad as the event team does!”, this in reference to what is dubbed the Incisiv TikTok Dance Challenge.

Stores can send their best #redwinechallenge videos – a dance routine set to UB40’s “Red Red Wine” – to the marketing team at Incisiv. The winners will then get awarded an Echo 8, Echo Auto, $100 Visa gift card, and 10 additional work hours to use during Black Friday week.

Here’s an example video Incisiv commissioned, showing what GameStop teams could do to earn themselves some prizes:

“Imagine what you could do with all those prizes!” the blurb for the contest states.

We’d hardly call the prizes amazing, as the average value is about £100, but they’re ok, and the extra work hours could prove valuable to anyone who feels they need the extra cash this Christmas.

Trouble is, unlike in the UK where retailer employees get paid for all the hours they’ve worked, it’s claimed that a US retailer like GameStop uses a monthly budget to cover wages, which means a lot of extra hours that may be required at a busy time will go unpaid, as it exceeds this budget. Sounds weird yeah? Yeah, we didn’t know that’s how it worked either. So no wonder there’s a lot of anger about this.

And it’s not the first bit of dodgy behaviour from GameStop, as the firm tried to claim “essential business” status for their stores during lockdown, forcing employees to come to work without adequate COVID-19 clean procedures or crowd management being in place.

Here’s our idea GameStop, why not pay your employees for all the hours they work? Trust me, it’s not communism, it’s just common sense. After all, you’re more than happy to pay your CFO Jim Bell (who makes $700,000 a year just in salary) his full wages, and we can bet he doesn’t put in tons of extra hours over the Holidays or has to dance like a tit to get his cheque. Think about that.