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Apple, Google, Bringing Low-Pay Support Employees In-House

Posted by samzenpus on from the come-on-into-the-house dept.

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.

5 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. What for? by penguinoid · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm sure there's nothing wrong with screwing your security staff to save a dollar.

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    1. Re:What for? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This is why.

      "Google, which has been under rising pressure along with other tech companies to release diversity data"

      And here:

      "Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,"

      Now, by in-sourcing their "low-pay employees," they are instantly closer to where they want to be.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Diversity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's a great way to change your diversity numbers without actually changing your core business.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Apple has been talking about this for a long time. by tlambert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.