While Rooster Teeth was not new to scandals of poor working conditions, like it was seen in the GlassDoor reviews incident (thanks to rwbyconversations on Tumblr), on the 15th of October 2022, former Rooster Teeth employee and voice of May Marigold and Shion Zaiden in RWBY Kdin Jenzen wrote a TwitLonger post detailing her experiences with the company. Among the accusations during her 9 years of working with the company are: repeatedly being called the ‘f’ slur, which was changed to a nickname so that the tradition could be kept-up on camera; incredibly long overtime hours, all of which were unpaid; consistent crunch, which continued immediately after returning from the hospital due to said crunch; severe underpayment when compared to colleagues in similar positions and especially when compared to industry rates; constant bullying and transphobic harassment and much more.
All of the accusations were corroborated by other ex- and current RT employees, many of whom also voiced their opinions on social media, such as animators, editors, designers and other voice actors, like Arryn Zech and Jen Brown, voices of Blake and Pyrrha respectively. While not every account of working in the company includes the level of harassment that Kdin suffered, almost everyone mentioned the maddening unpaid overtime hours and incredibly low pay.
A lot of personal accounts can be seen on Twitter, most retweeted by Kdin herself, but here are the links to just a few stories and comments from former RT employees, like Torrian Crawford, Zoe Terhune, Clayton De Wet, Gabriel Silva, Brian K. Lee, Zac Fox and Autumn Farrell.
Rooster Teeth responded with a statement on Twitter. It should be noted, that the company also responded to the aforementioned GlassDoor reviews incident and many other workplace controversies in the past, yet it seems that little to no actual change has ever been done.
Some current higher-up and well-known employees of the company issued personal apologies to Kdin, including company co-founder Geoff Ramsey, as well as Michael Jones, Gavin Free and others. Kdin responded to some of theses apologies.
It is clear that the original post only scratches the surface of the multitude of problems that have plagued Rooster Teeth for years and still hurt the people inside the company to this day. Although the initial conversation was sparked by the multitude of surprise layoffs in the company, including Achievement Hunter’s Matt Bragg, the issues that persist in the company have been going on for far longer than the company’s acquisition by WarnerMedia.
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