It's a rather disappointing truth that HN whales, and HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats. You'd think a tech focused forum would be more diverse, but there's only one viewpoint kosher here. Unfortunate that the very people screaming for diversity lack basic tolerance for diversity of thought.
You don't have to be a "left leaning, socialist Democrat" to disagree with the comment. It is rather worthless as an argument since it just a classic appeal-to-popularity fallacy.
As one someone I think you'd count in that group, I can say that you are unequivocally wrong. I am fairly active on this forum and I don't really reply to people who say things I agree with because its already been said. There is a surfeit of libertarians on this forum that give me opposing viewpoints to debate, as well as a minority of corpratists
Upvotes here may != correctness, but they are a pretty good proxy.
I've been here for a while, and most comments on policy/law really are downvoted for being dumb, not for whatever political label can be pattern-matched to it. If a suggestion presented in your comment correctly accounts for first-order effects and at least pretends to account for second-order effects, you can argue things that match pretty much any political ideology out there, as I've seen done here many times.
(Related, classifying things by political labels doesn't lead to correct answers in general.)
True that upvotes!=correctness. But the idea of karma and incentivizing those with higher karma with more privileges on HN basically means Upvotes=correctness for purposes of being heard on and being able to mould HN.
For all practical purposes on HN, a politically left leaning viewpoint is more likely to incentivize the op, and turn HN more left in a vicious cycle of Upvotes/Downvotes
It is well known that people with higher IQ and higher education lean left, and you'd expect HN's demography to be significantly biased that way. Also, conflating "Democrat" and "socialist" would get you laughed out of any non-American room. Perhaps this mistake is due to a lack of education about the world? ;)
> HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats
This is the hostile media effect: ideological users see the platform as dominated by their enemies. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671955, where HN is "the techno-libertarian norm around here".
HN is made of humans, and humans project concious and unconscious bias in their actions.
Though perceptions may vary, there certainly is one ideology that can be scientifically proven to exist among HN whales. It may or may not be the one I perceive, but to pretend like HN whales carry no ideological baggage in their voting is inaccurate.
Maybe a poll, or sentiment analysis of the most Up-voted and down-voted comments can reveal this.
Just because it’s standard practice doesn’t mean it’s ethical. In my experience, the perma-contractors were always getting ripped off when it came to benefits and job security to the maximum extent of California law by some of the most profitable companies in the world, companies that could trivially afford to pay. I found it abhorrent.
The solution is not to bandaid it by forcing a handful of companies to pay more generously, but to affect legislation that will provide everyone with the benefits and job security, regardless of employer. This would remove the inherent competitive advantages that large employers versus small businesses, and be easier to implement in the long run.
Unless somethings changed sense like the law not on google side.
The assignment length issue became a serious topic of conversation in the late 1980s when the IRS announced their intent to re-class Microsoft contractors as common law employees and ultimately make them eligible for the same stock option and retirement benefits offered to regular MS employees. The length of time Microsoft’s temporary and contract employees had been on assignment was part of that argument. The employees in question had all surpassed the ERISA “year of service” rule, which requires that once an” employee” works 1000 hours they are automatically eligible for ERISA governed benefits.
The risks Google appears to be most concerned about [...]
the risk of being found to be a joint employer, a legal
designation which could be exceedingly costly for Google
in terms of benefits.
If they paid their lower-caste 49.5% of 'not employees' properly instead of accounting their benefits away, their vast fortune would drop from $106,000,000,000 savings in the bank to $105,xxx,xxx,xxx this year then continue climbing next year.
You hit on a good point. Some companies effectively have a caste system, and I have worked in a couple of those situations. - “You can work with us in our fields, but can’t dine with us.”
That’s what happens when your CEO is Indian. They understand the caste system very deeply. What might seem outrageous to Americans is quite natural to them.
~50% of their employees are TVCs? That sounds crazy high - anyone else have knowledge on wether or not that’s unusual for tech / the Valley specifically?
That said kitchen staff, custodial, physical security, ... etc are likely counted in this group for google. Add in some portion on IT staff, tech support, and finance contractors which are more or less normal for many companies.
Also probably quite a big chunk of Google's workforce are doing 'manual' tasks like reviewing DMCA requests, ad complaints, responding to customer tickets etc. Those folks are probably low skill / low pay / not direct employees.
These would not be contracted staff, but by a vendor providing a package. 100 staff or 1 person, as a vendor provided service the staff member of the vendor has no link to the employer.
It's the same people, week-in, week-out. They get badges for practical reasons (access, compliance, security). It's the same people. Yes, it's through a contract agency - but so are the developers. And administrative staff. And some of the programmers.
Depends on sector. Back in Poland I "worked for" companies where that ratio might be even higher. It is not healthy at all, it's super fake, and courts in many places can, if they want to bother with it, actually reclassify such a relationship into a normal employment.
My guess is this goes all the way back to the Microsoft Permatemp case (you could tell by by email a-/v-). The IRS sets the line as to how you can treat temp staff and what benefits they can can get.
You can have onsite contract employees who are permanent. I was one for several years. You just start a contract with a separate company, then they are full employees of that company.
Because for all intents and purposes these workers appear to be Google employees, but they've structured their agreements in a way to say "no they are not", retain the benefit of having said employees, and don't pay back to society in the form of taxes.
This sort of circumvention of the spirit of the law is only really doable by large corporations, which means large corporations get to shirk their societal responsibilities while everyone else has do more or society loses out. That's where the outrage comes from, which I do not believe is faux
On income tax, but these rules around what gifts are allowed to go to TVCs are there because that is happening already and going untaxed.
Other additional points for anger around these sorts of faux employee setups is that they make it easier for companies to get around employee protections when it comes to firing/laying off because they've turned it into a contract with another company, and that traditional growth from low skill jobs inside a company has disappeared by this artificial barrier. You no longer hear stories about a janitor or secretary who worked their way up into executive ranks by seeing unfulfilled needs in the company and learning to solve them. You are either over the arbitrary skill value from the beginning, or you are kept in the lower ranks of second class citizen
>On income tax, but these rules around what gifts are allowed to go to TVCs are there because that is happening already and going untaxed.
Income tax is still paid for the employees income though, its just that Google pays a vendor firm, and that vendor firm pays the employment tax, and the vendor pays income tax on their income from the vendor firm.
"Temps, vendors and contractors are an important part of our extended workforce, but they are employed by other companies, not Google."
This is completely incorrect in every way except legally. Google employs them, and pretends that they don't by inserting another company in between.
When you find yourself doing something simple in a complicated way because the law gives you additional advantages, that's a great sign that the law is bad.
> When you find yourself doing something simple in a complicated way because the law gives you additional advantages, that's a great sign that the law is bad.
Not really. It's usually a sign that you're trying to evade the plain meaning of the law with technicalities.
On some axes, sure. On others: there is a basic social contract that underpins...well...society. And it's telling, to me, that Google is conflating "following the law" and "what might possibly cost us rounding errors in additional benefits" in the documentation quoted in the Guardian piece, to be honest: they're tipping their hand here.
And I don't think it's nearly as murky as some folks want it to look. Let's be real: more often than not, when somebody's doing something dirty, they know it's dirty.
Exactly. If you go to work every day at Google, you work at Google. It is unfortunate that laws don't reflect that, but of course if they did, companies would find loopholes. If working every day at Google were legally defined such that you work for Google, perhaps contractors would simply be forced to rotate between workplaces weekly to skirt these definitions.
I don't think that would make sense as a hard-line rule though. If IBM sells a new mainframe system, and sends a squad of engineers to help set it up for a few months, surely we shouldn't force those engineers to become employees of the customer.
Easy test: does IBM have a staff of mainframe site install engineers, who don't take direction from IBM's customer but rather from IBM's management, and can reasonably be expected to work on more than one site install during the length of their employment at IBM? That looks like an IBM employee to me.
Or does IBM sell development services to the customer, hire the workforce, turn over day-to-day management to the customer and fire the engineers when the setup job is done? That looks like the customer hired IBM as a cut-out.
Install engineers often do end up taking direction from customers, the same way as management consultants and such do.
I’d agree that the rest of it is a good test, but I think it’s also a test the vast majority of Google contractors would pass. Temp agencies don’t typically fire people at the end of every project, and certainly the janitorial services don’t.
That can probably summed up as "loopholes considered harmful". Unfortunately, we have an entire profession dedicated to extracting maximum value from the letter of the law, regardless of its original intent.
Temp agencies are a pretty nontrivial force in the employment world. If you work at a temp agency, they pay you regardless of whether you're bringing money, they do technical training and career advancement work, all the while you're "on deck" not actually being useful. Then a company like Google or Boeing or Joe's Game Studio comes along and says "we need 3 highly skilled C++ programmers in two weeks, for 6 months", and the temp agency sends you off to work there. You relocate, you work on some internal project for 6 months, and then you're back "on deck" at the temp agency, and then off to somewhere else. The company does not have the option to hire you permanently unless the temp agency put that into the agreement (probably for a price), the agency charged something like 2x or even 3x your salary to the company while you were working there, but your wage and benefits stay the same throughout, working or not.
So, who's your real employer?
Looking at this from an armchair, it's easy to miss that there's more going on than just, "Tim is on the team for the next few months." Whether or not you like the fact that this kind of agency exists and this kind of work is possible is another question.
But that's not how red/green/$color badges work at Google/Intel/Facebook/$company.
They're not "3 highly skilled C++ programmers", they're usually slotted into some kind of not as appreciated but still required role, like QA or data entry, and they're not "in two weeks, for 6 months", they're basically at a single host company for the entire time, but they renew the contract in 6 month increments until such time when the host company decides it doesn't need them anymore. Which is basically a form of downsizing.
They aren't some form of highly skilled consultants that drop to aid a project in a pinch. Usually they're basically indistinguishable from FTEs.
P.S. "3 C++ programmers for 6 months", in the context of adding developers to a team, is usually a sign of horrible project management. Software development just doesn't work like that, c.f. The Mythical Man Month.
If you have an understaffed team with a list of clearly defined tech debt, a temporary addition to the team to address the tech debt could ease pressure on the core team and allow them to "catch up" and work more efficiently.
This is fixed through tax legislation, where there are "bright line" tests for whether or not someone is an employee.
When I was a contractor in New Zealand, I had an external office, my contract allowed me to subcontract, I used my own equipment and I didn't go to the parties.
When they wanted to send me overseas? We negotiated a new contract which included paying me hourly rates for the flight hours.
Unmentioned in the Canadian and New Zealand documents, they also typically consider length of service as a hint. If the contractor is with a single company for more than 2 years, that's a hint that they're not really a contractor.
USA [3]:
1 Behavioral Control (instructions, when, rules, evaluation)
2 Financial Control (equipment, expenses, profit)
3 Relationship (contracts, benefits, permanency)
Canada [1]:
1 Control
2 Tools and Equipment
3 Ability to subcontract
4 Financial Risk
5 Outside office and/or staff
6 Able to increase profit
New Zealand [2]:
1 Intention test (what both parties intend?)
2 Control vs independence test (who sets the rules?)
3 Integration test (are they part of the team? uniforms/parties)
4 Fundamental/economic reality test (who pays what?)
This is de-facto status quo in tech. Usually the carrot is that you can transfer into the company as a FTE in a year or two. I've also seen people go from FTE to a contractor doing basically the same job just with a different title. Honestly, there should be a mass class action by these contractors at Google. Maybe that will put an end to it all. Trump could curry a lot of favor by investigating these issues. It's as big an issue as H1B.
" If you work at a temp agency, they pay you regardless of whether you're bringing money"
That's never been a thing I've seen. Cite?
"they do technical training and career advancement work"
I've only seen that in the sense of "we'll test your MS Office proficiency and offer you generic resume tips"
The temp agency model exists solely to enable large corporations to avoid having layoffs and reorgs: firing 49% of Google's staff would have a terrible effect on the stock price, and telling the temp agencies that they won't have contracts next quarter boosts the bottom line, instead.
Sure, these exist, but that's not really the same line of business.
You have your technical consulting firm and general IT contractors that sell services to companies whose main competence is not software developers. Then you have contractors go on-site, develop some software, and go back once the project is over.
But those aren't red badges in the sense we're talking about. We're talking about a company whose core competence is software development taking on contractors as members in existing software dev teams. The companies employing these contractors tend to be more like shell companies then technical consulting firms, and most of the training given to the contractor is the same as that given to FTEs, by the host company, since they have to work on the same code base and contractors and FTEs need to be in lock-step.
I ran a firm like this, and we had vendor badges. We weren't a "shell company", but even if we had been, the underlying idea would be the same: we W2'd our employees and invoiced our clients. We were on the hook for paying for employee downtime.
I'm responding to the claim above, about "that never being a thing they've seen", which seems silly to me because it's the basic way every staff-aug firm works.
How many of these contractors are software engineers who do get W-2d jobs? My understanding was that the majority were non software roles like cleaning staff, physical security guards, cafeteria workers, etc. I've worked in temp agencies for that type of work and you stop getting paid when the temp agency does.
Its all hourly paid work with the contracting firm only acting as a legal shield for the hiring company to be able to add/remove what are effectively their employees, without being beholden to the political or legal ramifications of layoffs
Since the instructions quoted refer to rewarding team members on projects with things like t-shirts, the impression I got from the article is: most of them.
Regardless: I was responding to a point upthread about the supposed rarity of these arrangements. I'm less interested in litigating other things.
I think the point is, firms like yours may exist. But they are in the minority at large tech firms who have software development as their core competency
I think I'm maybe not being clear. I'm saying: body shop or not, the core feature of a staff-aug firm --- the entire reason they exist at all --- is so that the staff-aug firm owns the W2 downtime risk, and the client can retain or release augmented staff at will.
The question from the top of the thread is whether staff-aug firm employees get paid even when Google doesn't need them. And the answer to that question, in general, is yes: they're W2 employees, not 1099s.
I'm sure Matasano did a number of things better than a large body shop firm. But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception.
>But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception
Having worked at a temp firm for a low skilled job, call center and data entry, you don't get paid for downtime. They have you on an agreement where you get paid hourly and just aren't scheduled. Or they let you go and call you back if there's more work later. The negotiating power isn't there for employees to have the companies shoulder that risk
Were your clients software (or software-adjacent) companies like Google, Intel, Facebook, etc., or companies who usually do not employ software development teams?
Also, since I know who you are, did your firm supply highly specialized engineers in fields such as security or cryptography?
Or were you involved in general software development?
As a counterpoint, I was a TVC in an engineering role at a large tech company. I had interviewed with the company for a full-time role, and was invited to TVC due to a companywide hiring freeze.
I negotiated my pay directly with the company. They basically told me "we can only hire TVCs now, and the vetting process for new vendors is exhausting. If you want to start right away, join this agency." The client was the agency's primary (or maybe only) customer. I was paid an hourly rate and expected to fill out a timesheet. If I wasn't working (e.g. if I was at the end of the client's max 1 year TVC policy), I wouldn't be paid. The agency took some commission on top of my hourly rate, but I never knew what it was.
The whole thing was a very thin veil to dissuade TVCs from going for back benefits like the famous Microsoft case. Both companies were upfront about that.
It's not doing something simple in a complicated way though. This is how the laws work for contract labor and Google is simply abiding by them.
Google hires people full time as employees and the laws for them require some things. Google also hires companies to provide services on a contract basis and the laws for them require others.
Is your contention that Google shouldn't subcontract labor for anything because Google is somehow different than every other company?
Most of the article jives with how contractors are treated here in the Midwest. The upside is you don't have yearly goals, you're not held to the higher standards of the FTE's, you don't have to attend boring "all company" meetings.
The only thing which popped out at me was the lower pay. When I contracted, I didn't have benefits (I had them through a third party provider) so my hourly rate was based on a 15-20% bump because of that. At not time was I ever getting paid less than my FTE counterparts when you took everything into consideration.
Having said this, is there a big pay gap between regular Google employees and contractors?
Most of these TVCs are kitchen staff, janitors, security guards, receptionists, call center employees, etc. So to the extent that there is a pay gap, it's usually because of the difference in average pay for those jobs themselves. Actual contracted engineers are quite the rarity; I've never worked with one.
The large groups of contractors at tech firms like Google are usually doing work the company has identified as not their core business. Where companies used to have janitorial staff, or cooks, or other administrators, they now put all those relationships onto contracting firms so they don't have to provide the same quality of benefits as they do to their FTEs and also have a much easier time firing them en masse then they would if they were legal employees of the tech firm.
As such, most of these people would be getting paid less than the software engineers if they were legal employees anyway, but they do lose out on benefits unless the contracting firm provides benefits on par with Google
I'm a contractor in the UK, and would actively like to be treated differently than an employee so that I can continue to fall outside of IR35 and thus not be taxed like an employee.
(A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact;
(B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
(C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.
It seems like tvcs doing software engineering at Google would not count as independent contractors (failing, in fact, to meet even one of the three conditions).
The Dynamex ruling does seem to touch on this; Dynamex, in fact, seemed to claim that California wage orders would only apply to joint employers as the core of their appeal (this ruling seems to take that as a given; and extend it beyond that). This appears to be coemployment question that is raised in the original article.
I don't think the courts (especially CA ones) will look fondly on companies using intermediate corporations as veils to obfuscate the employment relationship in any case.
You know all the fantastic, off the chart benefits that all Google employees get? It encourages outsourcing less skilled / lower ranking roles to vendor companies.
Jobs like customer support, manual QA, facilities, etc. end up being vendors instead of direct employees.
This doesn't mean they aren't FTEs of the vendor company. They can be permanent employees with benefits. They just aren't full time employees of Google.
Of course Google is going to have some temp and limited term contractors, but this category isn't just that. Hence why the article refers to "TVC": temp, vendor, and contractor.
This really isn't that outrageous, at most of the F500 companies I've consulted at they all have massive contractor workforces (including consultants) that don't have the same benefits as anyone else and are generally treated like second-class citizens. News like this that directs outrage at a specific company is just clickbait bullshit written by an amateur who doesn't understand how the broader workforce operates.
The article doesn't make you aware of the industry norms around Temps/Contractors, or reasons behind those norms. It just presents a bunch of factoids and insinuates ill intent.
Believe me, I'm not writing this because I like Google or the way IT hiring works right now. I'm writing this because I dislike bad journalism.
Many of the things the article complains about are entirely normal practices if you have contractors/temps. In fact, you can get legally punished if you don't do some of those things. The real question is why there are so many of CVTs (nearly half) at Google.
Agreed. Not to mention the fact that companies do this to protect themselves from what happened to Microsoft [0], not out of some evil desire to create an underclass of workers.
I have worked at such companies too. But I must state: "Everybody does it" doesn't make it not outrageous.
Every F500 company does it because they're cowards who don't want to pay the full cost of labor. Let's not praise cowardly behavior or make excuses for them.
I think what we're seeing in tech broadly is that a lot of idealistic people with great intentions are starting to run into the "real world" outputs of business and law without fully groking what is behind it.
All they see is this person is treated different than that person and want to fix an apparent inequity. Thats commendable to some degree and we need that as a voice if there is something that should be changed, but I think better informed, more experienced people should put the brakes on this stuff becoming overblown. Otherwise we risk real concerns being ignored because people see crying Wolf too often.
Is it crying wolf? Treating people as lesser so that you can make more money is generally considered ethically bad, even if its legally ok. The fact that fortune 500 companies, who are already not acting ethically or morally, engage in this activity does not mean that its incorrect for people to want to stop it
It's incorrect to characterize this as "treating people as lesser" in a blanket fashion by virtue of their work agreement.
In some cases that might be the sentiment, in others it might not be.
I think the primary disconnect here is that Google's amenities and benefits look lavish when compared to a subcontracted companies, but Google is held to the same rules as other companies with less lavish benefits.
So for example let's say I work for company x and we have normal corporate benefits. If we take a consulting contract with a small company or startup with no employee benefits, our 401k and health care benefits look great in comparison. So I don't care if I don't get a swag bag after a good production push. If the same company contracts with Google, then the 401k and health look paltry in comparison.
So it seems like people want different rules for these major companies, which is not how the law works.
The primary disconnect is that the group of people in this thread who think it is fine, seem to think that the contractors are all software engineers who are in demand enough to have actual good arrangements with their contracting firms, and would pass a smell test for being an actual contractor. It would be difficult to find a problem with this arrangement as both sides are gaining a benefit beyond earning just enough to live
The majority of the contractors at the large tech firms are all the low paid jobs that aren't in software like custodial staff, cafeteria workers, physical security guards, etc. For those contractors, the contracting firm is effectively a legal fiction to say they aren't employees of a company like google even when they go to work their every day, take orders from google management, and they are usually let go by the contracting firm once google stops employing them. The contracting firms get around costs for layoffs by just closing up shop and reopening under a new LLC or other entity.
The fact that these people are being treated as lesser by the rich tech firms, solely for the benefit of rich tech firms, is what is making people upset at this arrangement
But you are assuming that they are being treated as "lesser" when in my experience, they're simply treated as "not employees."
I was at my last job for over 15 years. For almost all of those 15 years, I saw the same van from a local electrical contractor in the parking lot pretty much every day. The same electrician was on site daily doing one installation or maintenance job or the other.
Now, I would imagine that the same guy was there every day because he knew our systems and the people he was working for/with very well so there was no benefit to us or the contracting company to send out a different electrician every day.
This is pretty much the same situation you describe, but there is no reason for the company to have electricians on staff, so it's contracted out. Likewise, the cafeteria staff, the security and the mailroom/office staff were all employees of Sodexho, Ricoh and some unknown security company.
Hell, even the tiny 6-person company that I started my career with, had an outside person come in twice a week to clean the place. It was a welcome change to the employees to having to do it ourselves. Should we have kept someone on staff simply to keep the office clean? No, that's what contractors are for!
When they work for a single client, everyday, at the client's direction, then they are an employee in fact if not by law. Treating them differently is a way for the real employer to save money and remove risk, its not just paying someone to show up for a few hours to clean when they are also cleaning other clients offices
>It's incorrect to characterize this as "treating people as lesser" in a blanket fashion by virtue of their work agreement.
It's really not. The work agreement is precisely what expresses how you are treating people. If the work agreement provides less to the worker, the worker is being treated as lesser.
Do you treat your plumber the same as your parents-in-law when they visit your home?
Sometimes people decide to become family for life. Sometimes they associate for as long as necessary to complete a transaction. Sometimes something in between.
Given the undercurrent of class warfare in today's politics and economics, it makes some sense that this is news. By the way, you do yourself no favors:
This really isn't that outrageous
are generally treated like second-class citizens
I think I understand the sentiment here, that in the context of the workforce, it's ethical to treat people in certain roles like second-class citizens because they'd ideally be able to transition from full-time to contractor, and vice versa, based on their needs. Or maybe I'm wrong here, you tell me. But one thing is certain: step outside of yourself for a minute, and read those two comments in series. You really don't think there will be outrage when people are treated like second-class citizens? Like, ever? It seems to be a human constant, across history, that people don't like to be treated as lesser-than, and will muster up a lot of outrage if they are.
I mean, to be really honest, I feel like I'm trying to convince you that the sky is blue.
The problem here is characterizing people as "second class citizens" as a blanket statement based on their work arrangement.
For all you know the subcontractor gives way better work arrangements and benefits than they would get as a Google FTE. It may not be likely in the specific case of Google but it's unknown.
For example, maybe I don't want to move to CA full time and I'd rather have some other benefit that Google doesn't have, like a flexible living or work arrangement. So the contract company has those perks, and I only do the Google contract for 4 months. Why should I prefer Google benefits over that? That's not a second class citizen.
Because Google is required to abide by the same contract law as every other company they have to abide in the same way.
So it's just wrong to characterize it that way and you can't have a different set of laws for Google than you have for every other company.
You're right -- if the discussion were about a "typical" large corporation.
But this is Google, the company that was not supposed to be typical, wasn't supposed to engage in penny-pinching corporate bean counting, wasn't supposed to reward a perpetrator of sexual harassment -- wasn't supposed to be "evil."
Google is a standard-bearer for the leading edge, prosperous, tech economy. It's the heart of the sector that is supposed to be saving us, creating abundant high-paying jobs for the people. It's the company of glorious benefits, 10% projects and enlightened employees. And California, that bright and shining star of democracy, that leading-edge progressive state, has pinned its hopes for the future (and its tax revenue and employment growth) on the likes of Google. Google is the one corporate monopoly we can all love.
But cracks are appearing. More and more we see that Google is a hell of a lot like a typical corporation. Our hopes for a prosperous enlightened, well-employed, tax-revenue rich future are dashed against the rocks of common corporate reality. And it's ugly.
> For all you know the subcontractor gives way better work arrangements and benefits than they would get as a Google FTE. It may not be likely in the specific case of Google but it's unknown.
This is pretty much never the case, and certainly isn't the case here. This hypothesis strains credulity.
Yeah, I agree with your sentiment. Also, this is absolutely correct in the context of this conversation:
you can't have a different set of laws for Google than you have for every other company.
While I agree with the sentiment, the reality is a bit different. This issue seems to be prompted mostly by contractors who are doing the same work for less pay, basically. Like, sure, in a walkout, you’re going to get a lot of support staff, cleaning staff, etc., but in the day-to-day, it seems like this issue has been made into a big deal because you might have a team of 15 people, where 8 are contractors, doing the same work, and being payed less. This helps the company’s bottom line immensely, where you don’t have to give equity to half of the people doing real work.
Again, I get your sentiment, but I don’t think that it captures the reality of what goes on.
You don't have to move to cali to work for google, and no one is getting better pay as a contractor at google or probably anywhere else, no one has better benefits. It would be shocking if this was the case.
You're absolutely right. It's wildly unethical to treat people as second-class citizens for no reason at all. This just might not be a scenario where there is no reason.
There's actually a rather complex wrinkle here. Failing to treat contractors as sufficiently different from employees can incur liability as if they are employees. This is not speculation, and has bitten large software companies - https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
In order to treat contractors as equal with employees, any company would have to essentially make them employees. While I'm absolutely certain this would be better for many people! I'm also certain that some would wind up unemployed. Not to mention that some people prefer contracting for their own reasons.
Perhaps there's cause for a careful examination of some subtlety here?
It's definitely complex. Thanks for the link to Microsoft's trouble in this area. It seems somewhat similar, based on this line:
Microsoft’s problem was that it failed to treat them like ICs — that is, like people running their own independent businesses. Instead, Microsoft integrated the workers into its workforce: They often worked on teams along with regular employees, sharing the same supervisors, performing identical functions and working the same core hours. Because Microsoft required that they work on site, they received admittance card keys, office equipment and supplies from the company.
From the information made public in the grievance letter, it seems that a significant portion of Google's TVCs (their name for ICs) would fall into this bin - workers doing the same work at a different level of compensation.
It'll be interesting to see this unfold as time goes on. People were out for blood even back in the 90s, and Bill Gates didn't even set out to create a walled garden for Ivy leaguers (and Stanford). Seems like Google may find itself at the forefront of another national conversation, this time about the growing class divide.
It definitely seems like a different name for the same arrangement at first blush!
Looking at it a bit, Google is using a different structure than Microsoft did. Microsoft had direct contracts with ICs. Google has contracts with vendors or contracting agencies, and TVCs are employees or contractors with those companies. I realize this seems like a distinction without difference, but in legal terms I suspect it's probably very different.
It's certainly a common arrangement for a company to have a series of teams that they contract out to other companies. I know some people in Sofia who make locally-spectacular wages doing this that they would struggle to access other ways.
As for a "conversation", I'd rather Teh Grauniad had no part of it. You can't have a conversation if you're wearing earplugs and using a megaphone, and that's really their MO.
>they all have massive contractor workforces (including consultants) that don't have the same benefits as anyone else
I can't tell for many F500 companies, but IT contractors in large Canadian banks in Toronto are typically paid at a significantly higher hourly rate (sometimes 70-100% higher) than equivalent FTEs. It outweighs the lack of FTE benefits up to the point where some FTEs deliberately switch to contracting.
I guess the labor market here has been able to balance demand/supply and pricing.
I can't speak for Google, but I work in a big company that has a lot of contractors. And ... there's not much "wrong" here.
The real engineering work is done by employees.
Contractors are for:
- Kitchen
- Security
- Maintenance & Repairs
- IT support (the regular IT are still employees)
- Engineers
The first 3 being contractors are standard in many companies.
The "engineers" category is not for cost cutting. In fact, often (most?) of the times, the company is paying a lot more per head for one of them than they pay for their own employees. I recall one case where the company was easily paying double what they pay their own engineers. The manager was upset because that contractor did not care for the company's deadlines, etc (one of the perks of being a contractor). The manager felt the company should just kill the agreement and hire a regular engineer - save money and get work done on time. But he was overruled.
The only category I think are royally getting screwed are the IT support staff. I spoke to one to get an idea of their pay, and it was abysmal. For his skills and the work he did, he was definitely more useful to the company than many of our FTE's.
At least in my company, this isn't a case of perma-temps.
I see it is sometimes used to circumvent equal-pay or labor laws to some extent, but this practice is so widespread that I find it hard to point a finger to Google on this one.
Every large company, on every field, does it to some extent.
I was using that in Brazil a couple years back, inside a portal part of a telco. We paid a company to provide us with an elastic workforce that could grow, change and be reduced as we needed it to be. The company was hired (and paid) to absorb the risks of hiring, retention and to, sometimes, provide working space, and it did so for many other clients.
I've heard NASA does this too. Because headcount is effectively set in Congress, they rely on TVCs to do most of the work. Only a small share of NASA are "civil servants," who are actually employed by NASA.
In this and other examples of Google's memos to FTEs, I've noticed they tend to lump together actually following the law with doing something perfectly legal that exposes them to higher taxation.
I get the whole market-based "everything is just an incentive" logic, and that the US legal code is so, so far from being a coherent moral document. But still, this seems like a coldly utilitarian stance use in the propaganda, vs confine to executive meetings where there's no reason to be sunny.
The reason for this is probably that if they treat vendors the same way, then they are not justified temp or vendor positions but should be FTE. Which of course Google wouldn't wont. I'm sure there is also a time box on how long they can be a vendor, e.g. a max of a year or two before they have to move on. Microsoft got into trouble I heard because they treated vendors "too nice" a couple years back if I remember right.
I've shared this before, but it's worth sharing again: Andrew Norman Wilon's Workers Leaving the Googleplex from 2011[0]. It's a performance piece (he used to do this live) retelling his experience as an intern at Google, and why he was fired.
(In the live version I saw he drew parallels to Brave New World, which felt quite apt)
Completely disgusted by a lot of these comments. It is outrageous. It is unfair.
People citing the "tax law" excuse are either willfully ignorant or they just do not care.
Why does Google not give them gifts, invite them to the company Christmas party, or let them in on celebratory team meetings? It is not because "the temp agency will handle it". It is not because "a shirt makes taxes complicated."
Google and it's ilk make sure these people are on the outside to dehumanize them. To make it clear they are not a part of the company so, when TVCs are abused other workers do not speak up. It normalizes treating these people like shit. "Just a contractor."
A lot of these TVCs do not get decent healthcare. They can, and often do, get 0 vacation time. They sit along with the full time employees but everybody knows "they are the expendable ones." They can be fired for any reason, including bringing up the fact that they were sexually harassed.
TVCs are employees deprived of their rights through a loophole.
You have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have never headed a company.
The issue is that if you hire temporary contractors and treat them like your employees, then you have to extend the status of employment to them, including withholding payroll taxes, otherwise the government will come after you.
Google doesn't give two shits about giving people t-shirts and access to their gyms. The issue is, if they do these things for temp contractors, then the temps become employees.
You hire temps in situations where you don't actually need a full-time worker for a long period of time. If you are not allowed to hire temps, the choice then becomes should we hire anyone at all?
When Google does need a full-time worker, they do hire them, and they do pay them as full employees.
If you have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors, go see your Congressman and ask them to change the laws that make it so companies have to distinguish between temps and full-time in their hiring.
> You have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have never headed a company.
I actually have but whatever. I do not have to run a company to have opinions about a loophole in modern labor laws. Also, the aggression isn't necessary.
Maybe having empathy and wanting better benefits for the people you take advantage of is an "Unknown World" to you. But for me, the rise permatemp has an effect on the people around me.
> The issue is that if you hire temporary contractors and treat them like your employees, then you have to extend the status of employment to them, including withholding payroll taxes, otherwise the government will come after you.
> Google doesn't give two shits about giving people t-shirts and access to their gyms. The issue is, if they do these things for temp contractors, then the temps become employees.
A lot of these workers are permatemps, who they keep on as temps in order to not have to give them full employee benefits.
So yes, what you say is exactly correct but does not refute my assertion that these policies serve to dehumanize the parts of the workforce Google considers expendable.
> You hire temps in situations where you don't actually need a full-time worker for a long period of time. If you are not allowed to hire temps, the choice then becomes should we hire anyone at all?
Except for the fact that they do hire them as long-term full time employees, but they keep them on as independent contractors hired through an external agency to abdicate responsibility for providing them with benefits.
> If you have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors, go see your Congressman and ask them to change the laws that make it so companies have to distinguish between temps and full-time in their hiring.
I clearly do have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors. And what else should I do?
Oh, maybe advocate for workers right's on social media and tell the other side of the story. Which is what I am doing and apparently have triggered you. The founder doth protest too much, methinks.
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143 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadgifts are taxable income. The contracting company has no mechanisms for collecting the tax.
HN whales notoriously upvote anti-corporate posts. It reminds me of slacktivism.
What proves "correctness" in this sense?
I've been here for a while, and most comments on policy/law really are downvoted for being dumb, not for whatever political label can be pattern-matched to it. If a suggestion presented in your comment correctly accounts for first-order effects and at least pretends to account for second-order effects, you can argue things that match pretty much any political ideology out there, as I've seen done here many times.
(Related, classifying things by political labels doesn't lead to correct answers in general.)
For all practical purposes on HN, a politically left leaning viewpoint is more likely to incentivize the op, and turn HN more left in a vicious cycle of Upvotes/Downvotes
Then you think everyone here is less intelligent than they lead on.
This is the hostile media effect: ideological users see the platform as dominated by their enemies. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671955, where HN is "the techno-libertarian norm around here".
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...
Though perceptions may vary, there certainly is one ideology that can be scientifically proven to exist among HN whales. It may or may not be the one I perceive, but to pretend like HN whales carry no ideological baggage in their voting is inaccurate.
Maybe a poll, or sentiment analysis of the most Up-voted and down-voted comments can reveal this.
Thanks
The assignment length issue became a serious topic of conversation in the late 1980s when the IRS announced their intent to re-class Microsoft contractors as common law employees and ultimately make them eligible for the same stock option and retirement benefits offered to regular MS employees. The length of time Microsoft’s temporary and contract employees had been on assignment was part of that argument. The employees in question had all surpassed the ERISA “year of service” rule, which requires that once an” employee” works 1000 hours they are automatically eligible for ERISA governed benefits.
That said kitchen staff, custodial, physical security, ... etc are likely counted in this group for google. Add in some portion on IT staff, tech support, and finance contractors which are more or less normal for many companies.
What happened to the culture that made its chef a millionaire [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
These would not be contracted staff, but by a vendor providing a package. 100 staff or 1 person, as a vendor provided service the staff member of the vendor has no link to the employer.
Ouch.
That's a valid reason. Why the faux outrage?
This sort of circumvention of the spirit of the law is only really doable by large corporations, which means large corporations get to shirk their societal responsibilities while everyone else has do more or society loses out. That's where the outrage comes from, which I do not believe is faux
Other additional points for anger around these sorts of faux employee setups is that they make it easier for companies to get around employee protections when it comes to firing/laying off because they've turned it into a contract with another company, and that traditional growth from low skill jobs inside a company has disappeared by this artificial barrier. You no longer hear stories about a janitor or secretary who worked their way up into executive ranks by seeing unfulfilled needs in the company and learning to solve them. You are either over the arbitrary skill value from the beginning, or you are kept in the lower ranks of second class citizen
Income tax is still paid for the employees income though, its just that Google pays a vendor firm, and that vendor firm pays the employment tax, and the vendor pays income tax on their income from the vendor firm.
"Temps, vendors and contractors are an important part of our extended workforce, but they are employed by other companies, not Google."
This is completely incorrect in every way except legally. Google employs them, and pretends that they don't by inserting another company in between.
When you find yourself doing something simple in a complicated way because the law gives you additional advantages, that's a great sign that the law is bad.
Not really. It's usually a sign that you're trying to evade the plain meaning of the law with technicalities.
And I don't think it's nearly as murky as some folks want it to look. Let's be real: more often than not, when somebody's doing something dirty, they know it's dirty.
Or does IBM sell development services to the customer, hire the workforce, turn over day-to-day management to the customer and fire the engineers when the setup job is done? That looks like the customer hired IBM as a cut-out.
I’d agree that the rest of it is a good test, but I think it’s also a test the vast majority of Google contractors would pass. Temp agencies don’t typically fire people at the end of every project, and certainly the janitorial services don’t.
So hard to imagine that a codebase needs janitors too?
Temp agencies are a pretty nontrivial force in the employment world. If you work at a temp agency, they pay you regardless of whether you're bringing money, they do technical training and career advancement work, all the while you're "on deck" not actually being useful. Then a company like Google or Boeing or Joe's Game Studio comes along and says "we need 3 highly skilled C++ programmers in two weeks, for 6 months", and the temp agency sends you off to work there. You relocate, you work on some internal project for 6 months, and then you're back "on deck" at the temp agency, and then off to somewhere else. The company does not have the option to hire you permanently unless the temp agency put that into the agreement (probably for a price), the agency charged something like 2x or even 3x your salary to the company while you were working there, but your wage and benefits stay the same throughout, working or not.
So, who's your real employer?
Looking at this from an armchair, it's easy to miss that there's more going on than just, "Tim is on the team for the next few months." Whether or not you like the fact that this kind of agency exists and this kind of work is possible is another question.
They're not "3 highly skilled C++ programmers", they're usually slotted into some kind of not as appreciated but still required role, like QA or data entry, and they're not "in two weeks, for 6 months", they're basically at a single host company for the entire time, but they renew the contract in 6 month increments until such time when the host company decides it doesn't need them anymore. Which is basically a form of downsizing.
They aren't some form of highly skilled consultants that drop to aid a project in a pinch. Usually they're basically indistinguishable from FTEs.
When I was a contractor in New Zealand, I had an external office, my contract allowed me to subcontract, I used my own equipment and I didn't go to the parties.
When they wanted to send me overseas? We negotiated a new contract which included paying me hourly rates for the flight hours.
Unmentioned in the Canadian and New Zealand documents, they also typically consider length of service as a hint. If the contractor is with a single company for more than 2 years, that's a hint that they're not really a contractor.
USA [3]:
Canada [1]: New Zealand [2]: [1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi...[2]: https://www.employment.govt.nz/starting-employment/who-is-an...
[3]: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
That's never been a thing I've seen. Cite?
"they do technical training and career advancement work"
I've only seen that in the sense of "we'll test your MS Office proficiency and offer you generic resume tips"
The temp agency model exists solely to enable large corporations to avoid having layoffs and reorgs: firing 49% of Google's staff would have a terrible effect on the stock price, and telling the temp agencies that they won't have contracts next quarter boosts the bottom line, instead.
You have your technical consulting firm and general IT contractors that sell services to companies whose main competence is not software developers. Then you have contractors go on-site, develop some software, and go back once the project is over.
But those aren't red badges in the sense we're talking about. We're talking about a company whose core competence is software development taking on contractors as members in existing software dev teams. The companies employing these contractors tend to be more like shell companies then technical consulting firms, and most of the training given to the contractor is the same as that given to FTEs, by the host company, since they have to work on the same code base and contractors and FTEs need to be in lock-step.
I'm responding to the claim above, about "that never being a thing they've seen", which seems silly to me because it's the basic way every staff-aug firm works.
Its all hourly paid work with the contracting firm only acting as a legal shield for the hiring company to be able to add/remove what are effectively their employees, without being beholden to the political or legal ramifications of layoffs
Regardless: I was responding to a point upthread about the supposed rarity of these arrangements. I'm less interested in litigating other things.
The question from the top of the thread is whether staff-aug firm employees get paid even when Google doesn't need them. And the answer to that question, in general, is yes: they're W2 employees, not 1099s.
I'm sure Matasano did a number of things better than a large body shop firm. But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception.
>But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception
Having worked at a temp firm for a low skilled job, call center and data entry, you don't get paid for downtime. They have you on an agreement where you get paid hourly and just aren't scheduled. Or they let you go and call you back if there's more work later. The negotiating power isn't there for employees to have the companies shoulder that risk
Also, since I know who you are, did your firm supply highly specialized engineers in fields such as security or cryptography? Or were you involved in general software development?
I negotiated my pay directly with the company. They basically told me "we can only hire TVCs now, and the vetting process for new vendors is exhausting. If you want to start right away, join this agency." The client was the agency's primary (or maybe only) customer. I was paid an hourly rate and expected to fill out a timesheet. If I wasn't working (e.g. if I was at the end of the client's max 1 year TVC policy), I wouldn't be paid. The agency took some commission on top of my hourly rate, but I never knew what it was.
The whole thing was a very thin veil to dissuade TVCs from going for back benefits like the famous Microsoft case. Both companies were upfront about that.
Google hires people full time as employees and the laws for them require some things. Google also hires companies to provide services on a contract basis and the laws for them require others.
Is your contention that Google shouldn't subcontract labor for anything because Google is somehow different than every other company?
The only thing which popped out at me was the lower pay. When I contracted, I didn't have benefits (I had them through a third party provider) so my hourly rate was based on a 15-20% bump because of that. At not time was I ever getting paid less than my FTE counterparts when you took everything into consideration.
Having said this, is there a big pay gap between regular Google employees and contractors?
As such, most of these people would be getting paid less than the software engineers if they were legal employees anyway, but they do lose out on benefits unless the contracting firm provides benefits on par with Google
(A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact;
(B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
(C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.
It seems like tvcs doing software engineering at Google would not count as independent contractors (failing, in fact, to meet even one of the three conditions).
Edits for clarity.
I don't think the courts (especially CA ones) will look fondly on companies using intermediate corporations as veils to obfuscate the employment relationship in any case.
Jobs like customer support, manual QA, facilities, etc. end up being vendors instead of direct employees.
This doesn't mean they aren't FTEs of the vendor company. They can be permanent employees with benefits. They just aren't full time employees of Google.
Of course Google is going to have some temp and limited term contractors, but this category isn't just that. Hence why the article refers to "TVC": temp, vendor, and contractor.
Believe me, I'm not writing this because I like Google or the way IT hiring works right now. I'm writing this because I dislike bad journalism.
Many of the things the article complains about are entirely normal practices if you have contractors/temps. In fact, you can get legally punished if you don't do some of those things. The real question is why there are so many of CVTs (nearly half) at Google.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Every F500 company does it because they're cowards who don't want to pay the full cost of labor. Let's not praise cowardly behavior or make excuses for them.
I think what we're seeing in tech broadly is that a lot of idealistic people with great intentions are starting to run into the "real world" outputs of business and law without fully groking what is behind it.
All they see is this person is treated different than that person and want to fix an apparent inequity. Thats commendable to some degree and we need that as a voice if there is something that should be changed, but I think better informed, more experienced people should put the brakes on this stuff becoming overblown. Otherwise we risk real concerns being ignored because people see crying Wolf too often.
In some cases that might be the sentiment, in others it might not be.
I think the primary disconnect here is that Google's amenities and benefits look lavish when compared to a subcontracted companies, but Google is held to the same rules as other companies with less lavish benefits.
So for example let's say I work for company x and we have normal corporate benefits. If we take a consulting contract with a small company or startup with no employee benefits, our 401k and health care benefits look great in comparison. So I don't care if I don't get a swag bag after a good production push. If the same company contracts with Google, then the 401k and health look paltry in comparison.
So it seems like people want different rules for these major companies, which is not how the law works.
The majority of the contractors at the large tech firms are all the low paid jobs that aren't in software like custodial staff, cafeteria workers, physical security guards, etc. For those contractors, the contracting firm is effectively a legal fiction to say they aren't employees of a company like google even when they go to work their every day, take orders from google management, and they are usually let go by the contracting firm once google stops employing them. The contracting firms get around costs for layoffs by just closing up shop and reopening under a new LLC or other entity.
The fact that these people are being treated as lesser by the rich tech firms, solely for the benefit of rich tech firms, is what is making people upset at this arrangement
I was at my last job for over 15 years. For almost all of those 15 years, I saw the same van from a local electrical contractor in the parking lot pretty much every day. The same electrician was on site daily doing one installation or maintenance job or the other.
Now, I would imagine that the same guy was there every day because he knew our systems and the people he was working for/with very well so there was no benefit to us or the contracting company to send out a different electrician every day.
This is pretty much the same situation you describe, but there is no reason for the company to have electricians on staff, so it's contracted out. Likewise, the cafeteria staff, the security and the mailroom/office staff were all employees of Sodexho, Ricoh and some unknown security company.
Hell, even the tiny 6-person company that I started my career with, had an outside person come in twice a week to clean the place. It was a welcome change to the employees to having to do it ourselves. Should we have kept someone on staff simply to keep the office clean? No, that's what contractors are for!
It's really not. The work agreement is precisely what expresses how you are treating people. If the work agreement provides less to the worker, the worker is being treated as lesser.
Sometimes people decide to become family for life. Sometimes they associate for as long as necessary to complete a transaction. Sometimes something in between.
This really isn't that outrageous
are generally treated like second-class citizens
I think I understand the sentiment here, that in the context of the workforce, it's ethical to treat people in certain roles like second-class citizens because they'd ideally be able to transition from full-time to contractor, and vice versa, based on their needs. Or maybe I'm wrong here, you tell me. But one thing is certain: step outside of yourself for a minute, and read those two comments in series. You really don't think there will be outrage when people are treated like second-class citizens? Like, ever? It seems to be a human constant, across history, that people don't like to be treated as lesser-than, and will muster up a lot of outrage if they are.
I mean, to be really honest, I feel like I'm trying to convince you that the sky is blue.
For all you know the subcontractor gives way better work arrangements and benefits than they would get as a Google FTE. It may not be likely in the specific case of Google but it's unknown.
For example, maybe I don't want to move to CA full time and I'd rather have some other benefit that Google doesn't have, like a flexible living or work arrangement. So the contract company has those perks, and I only do the Google contract for 4 months. Why should I prefer Google benefits over that? That's not a second class citizen.
Because Google is required to abide by the same contract law as every other company they have to abide in the same way.
So it's just wrong to characterize it that way and you can't have a different set of laws for Google than you have for every other company.
But this is Google, the company that was not supposed to be typical, wasn't supposed to engage in penny-pinching corporate bean counting, wasn't supposed to reward a perpetrator of sexual harassment -- wasn't supposed to be "evil."
Google is a standard-bearer for the leading edge, prosperous, tech economy. It's the heart of the sector that is supposed to be saving us, creating abundant high-paying jobs for the people. It's the company of glorious benefits, 10% projects and enlightened employees. And California, that bright and shining star of democracy, that leading-edge progressive state, has pinned its hopes for the future (and its tax revenue and employment growth) on the likes of Google. Google is the one corporate monopoly we can all love.
But cracks are appearing. More and more we see that Google is a hell of a lot like a typical corporation. Our hopes for a prosperous enlightened, well-employed, tax-revenue rich future are dashed against the rocks of common corporate reality. And it's ugly.
That's the story here.
This is pretty much never the case, and certainly isn't the case here. This hypothesis strains credulity.
you can't have a different set of laws for Google than you have for every other company.
While I agree with the sentiment, the reality is a bit different. This issue seems to be prompted mostly by contractors who are doing the same work for less pay, basically. Like, sure, in a walkout, you’re going to get a lot of support staff, cleaning staff, etc., but in the day-to-day, it seems like this issue has been made into a big deal because you might have a team of 15 people, where 8 are contractors, doing the same work, and being payed less. This helps the company’s bottom line immensely, where you don’t have to give equity to half of the people doing real work.
Again, I get your sentiment, but I don’t think that it captures the reality of what goes on.
There's actually a rather complex wrinkle here. Failing to treat contractors as sufficiently different from employees can incur liability as if they are employees. This is not speculation, and has bitten large software companies - https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
In order to treat contractors as equal with employees, any company would have to essentially make them employees. While I'm absolutely certain this would be better for many people! I'm also certain that some would wind up unemployed. Not to mention that some people prefer contracting for their own reasons.
Perhaps there's cause for a careful examination of some subtlety here?
Microsoft’s problem was that it failed to treat them like ICs — that is, like people running their own independent businesses. Instead, Microsoft integrated the workers into its workforce: They often worked on teams along with regular employees, sharing the same supervisors, performing identical functions and working the same core hours. Because Microsoft required that they work on site, they received admittance card keys, office equipment and supplies from the company.
From the information made public in the grievance letter, it seems that a significant portion of Google's TVCs (their name for ICs) would fall into this bin - workers doing the same work at a different level of compensation.
It'll be interesting to see this unfold as time goes on. People were out for blood even back in the 90s, and Bill Gates didn't even set out to create a walled garden for Ivy leaguers (and Stanford). Seems like Google may find itself at the forefront of another national conversation, this time about the growing class divide.
Looking at it a bit, Google is using a different structure than Microsoft did. Microsoft had direct contracts with ICs. Google has contracts with vendors or contracting agencies, and TVCs are employees or contractors with those companies. I realize this seems like a distinction without difference, but in legal terms I suspect it's probably very different.
It's certainly a common arrangement for a company to have a series of teams that they contract out to other companies. I know some people in Sofia who make locally-spectacular wages doing this that they would struggle to access other ways.
As for a "conversation", I'd rather Teh Grauniad had no part of it. You can't have a conversation if you're wearing earplugs and using a megaphone, and that's really their MO.
Had to look up Teh Grauniad, thanks for the laugh!
I can't tell for many F500 companies, but IT contractors in large Canadian banks in Toronto are typically paid at a significantly higher hourly rate (sometimes 70-100% higher) than equivalent FTEs. It outweighs the lack of FTE benefits up to the point where some FTEs deliberately switch to contracting.
I guess the labor market here has been able to balance demand/supply and pricing.
The real engineering work is done by employees.
Contractors are for:
- Kitchen
- Security
- Maintenance & Repairs
- IT support (the regular IT are still employees)
- Engineers
The first 3 being contractors are standard in many companies.
The "engineers" category is not for cost cutting. In fact, often (most?) of the times, the company is paying a lot more per head for one of them than they pay for their own employees. I recall one case where the company was easily paying double what they pay their own engineers. The manager was upset because that contractor did not care for the company's deadlines, etc (one of the perks of being a contractor). The manager felt the company should just kill the agreement and hire a regular engineer - save money and get work done on time. But he was overruled.
The only category I think are royally getting screwed are the IT support staff. I spoke to one to get an idea of their pay, and it was abysmal. For his skills and the work he did, he was definitely more useful to the company than many of our FTE's.
At least in my company, this isn't a case of perma-temps.
Every large company, on every field, does it to some extent.
I was using that in Brazil a couple years back, inside a portal part of a telco. We paid a company to provide us with an elastic workforce that could grow, change and be reduced as we needed it to be. The company was hired (and paid) to absorb the risks of hiring, retention and to, sometimes, provide working space, and it did so for many other clients.
I get the whole market-based "everything is just an incentive" logic, and that the US legal code is so, so far from being a coherent moral document. But still, this seems like a coldly utilitarian stance use in the propaganda, vs confine to executive meetings where there's no reason to be sunny.
(In the live version I saw he drew parallels to Brave New World, which felt quite apt)
[0] http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html
People citing the "tax law" excuse are either willfully ignorant or they just do not care.
Why does Google not give them gifts, invite them to the company Christmas party, or let them in on celebratory team meetings? It is not because "the temp agency will handle it". It is not because "a shirt makes taxes complicated."
Google and it's ilk make sure these people are on the outside to dehumanize them. To make it clear they are not a part of the company so, when TVCs are abused other workers do not speak up. It normalizes treating these people like shit. "Just a contractor."
A lot of these TVCs do not get decent healthcare. They can, and often do, get 0 vacation time. They sit along with the full time employees but everybody knows "they are the expendable ones." They can be fired for any reason, including bringing up the fact that they were sexually harassed.
TVCs are employees deprived of their rights through a loophole.
The issue is that if you hire temporary contractors and treat them like your employees, then you have to extend the status of employment to them, including withholding payroll taxes, otherwise the government will come after you.
Google doesn't give two shits about giving people t-shirts and access to their gyms. The issue is, if they do these things for temp contractors, then the temps become employees.
You hire temps in situations where you don't actually need a full-time worker for a long period of time. If you are not allowed to hire temps, the choice then becomes should we hire anyone at all?
When Google does need a full-time worker, they do hire them, and they do pay them as full employees.
If you have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors, go see your Congressman and ask them to change the laws that make it so companies have to distinguish between temps and full-time in their hiring.
I actually have but whatever. I do not have to run a company to have opinions about a loophole in modern labor laws. Also, the aggression isn't necessary.
Maybe having empathy and wanting better benefits for the people you take advantage of is an "Unknown World" to you. But for me, the rise permatemp has an effect on the people around me.
> The issue is that if you hire temporary contractors and treat them like your employees, then you have to extend the status of employment to them, including withholding payroll taxes, otherwise the government will come after you.
> Google doesn't give two shits about giving people t-shirts and access to their gyms. The issue is, if they do these things for temp contractors, then the temps become employees.
A lot of these workers are permatemps, who they keep on as temps in order to not have to give them full employee benefits.
So yes, what you say is exactly correct but does not refute my assertion that these policies serve to dehumanize the parts of the workforce Google considers expendable.
> You hire temps in situations where you don't actually need a full-time worker for a long period of time. If you are not allowed to hire temps, the choice then becomes should we hire anyone at all?
Except for the fact that they do hire them as long-term full time employees, but they keep them on as independent contractors hired through an external agency to abdicate responsibility for providing them with benefits.
> If you have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors, go see your Congressman and ask them to change the laws that make it so companies have to distinguish between temps and full-time in their hiring.
I clearly do have a problem with the casteism developing between full time employees and contractors. And what else should I do?
Oh, maybe advocate for workers right's on social media and tell the other side of the story. Which is what I am doing and apparently have triggered you. The founder doth protest too much, methinks.