About Half of Google's Workers Are Contractors Who Don't Receive the Same Benefits as Direct Employees (bloomberg.com)

Every day, tens of thousands of people stream into Google offices wearing red name badges. They eat in Google's cafeterias, ride its commuter shuttles and work alongside its celebrated geeks. But they can't access all of the company's celebrated perks. They aren't entitled to stock and can't enter certain offices. Many don't have health insurance. Bloomberg: Before each weekly Google all-hands meeting, trays of hors d'oeuvres and, sometimes, kegs of beer are carted into an auditorium and satellite offices around the globe for employees, who wear white badges. Those without white badges are asked to return to their desks. Google's Alphabet employs hordes of these red-badged contract workers in addition to its full-fledged staff. They serve meals and clean offices. They write code, handle sales calls, recruit staff, screen YouTube videos, test self-driving cars and even manage entire teams -- a sea of skilled laborers that fuel the $795 billion company but reap few of the benefits and opportunities available to direct employees.

Earlier this year, those contractors outnumbered direct employees for the first time in the company's twenty-year history, according to a person who viewed the numbers on an internal company database. It's unclear if that is still the case. Alphabet reported 89,058 direct employees at the end of the second quarter. The company declined to comment on the number of contract workers.

Comments

Re:Still better than socialism

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay off the interstate and stop drinking clean water, moron. It's socialism.

diversity contractors

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I missed it in TFA, but I don't think that Google applies the same diversity requirements when hiring its contract employees as it does its permanent ones. I wonder what its employee demographics would show if they included contract workers into the total labor force.

Re:So what??

[r1348]

To be honest, I'm one of those red badges, about to transition to FTE in a different .
I work in a relatively small office (around 300 people) so I can't really say about behemoths like Mountain View or Dublin, but in the day-to-day operations red badges are not much different than white ones. You still get invited to events and initiatives, you have lunch with whoever pleases you independently of badge color, and while it's true that you don't get full FTE benefits, that's simply because you're hired by a different company (I work for an actual company selling a service to Google, not a mere intermediary like Adecco). Health insurance is a very American concern, I live in a country with universal health care so the impact on the whole benefit package is much smaller.
It still allows you to enter in a big corporate environment and puts you in the radar for other big companies (that's exactly what happened to me, I didn't apply for my new position, I was proposed it).