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Apple, Google, Bringing Low-Pay Support Employees In-House
jfruh writes One of the knocks against Silicon Valley giants as "job creators" is that the companies themselves often only hire high-end employees; support staff like security guards and janitors are contracted out to staffing agencies and receive lower pay and fewer benefits, even if they work on-site full time. That now seems to be changing, with Apple and Google putting security guards on their own payroll.
If you want to eliminate local outsourcing then tax services the same as physical items - with a sales tax.
I thought Apple had already done this. Their cafeteria workers have been employees since the late 90s, give or take, and the folks who sit at the front desk are also employees. I had always assumed the security guards were as well, but apparently not.
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It's a great way to change your diversity numbers without actually changing your core business.
I've only had good experience with staffing agencies. Because it's easy for them to let you go, that means they're also more willing to take risks in hiring you. I was able to get a job really fast right out of college with one, which helped establish my new skill set. Few people want to permanently hire somebody with a degree and no experience because it's too easy to find somebody who is a dud, even if they have a 4.0 GPA like I did.
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Apple has been talking about this for a long time.
You really don't want your security people to be contract workers; they have access, at least at the supervisory level, to all sorts of sensitive areas of your building, including Jony Ive's office in the design wing, where they could happily use their phones to photograph prototypes.
Google began talking about doing this about three years ago, when they switched to the same contract security firm Apple used, and the Apple/Google relationship started to become more and more adversarial on top of that (I knew the supervisory staff, and many of the individual contractors at Apple, and recognized them when they came to work for Google.
I think this is being done more to prevent industrial espionage, than anything else.
At both Apple and Google, we moved our trash outside explicitly sensitive secure areas at night, so that the janitorial staff avoided entry. For a lot of it, it was honor system (if you count being on camera but not having a lurking linebacker ready to take you out if you make a wrong move, as "honor system"), where the secure offices without physical electronic security locks has a red sticky dot placed above the room doorknob to prevent people trying to go in.
This also has dick-all to do with any kind of "gentrification" issues that the article claims, since most of the people I know who worked security lived East Bay, and many of them owned their own houses.
Worked with a staffing company before, but not with a security guard position.
The put me to work in a factor making $9 an hour doing work that should have started at a minimum of $15 an hour at the least. I was one of the only people there short of the managers who spoke english as the main language, half of the employees didn't even speak english at all and they had betting pools on how long before the new guys quit.
And have to love the schedule, 6 days on, 1 day off, 6 days on, 2 days off, 6 days on, 4 days off, repeat. And if you were unlucky, you landed on the rotating crew with a similar schedule you were just working all 3 shifts through out it.
The luxury of Megaforce.....
I honestly would like to see temp and staffing agencies banned for some of the abuses they allow in both labor and pay.
Bringing your security staff in-house makes them a more 'bought in' part of the organization. Apple and Google take security very seriously, because they think they are the most innovative organizations on earth and that they have many secrets to protect.
It just makes sense to not have outsiders guarding the gates.
That isn't why. Apple, Facebook, and Google have all been pushed recently by politicians to improve the demographic mix of their employees. In-sourcing the cleaning staff is an easy way to do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Friends of ours have a business cleaning corporate offices. Twice they have been offered money to plug a netbook into a network port in an unoccupied cubicle, leave it for a few days, and then bring it back. They didn't of course, but it must have been tempting.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin