Google's 'Shadow Workforce' of Contractors Demands Higher Wages, Equal Benefits in a Letter To CEO Sundar Pichai (cnbc.com)

Members of Google's "shadow workforce" of temporary workers and contractors is demanding higher wages and equal benefits to full employees in an open letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai. From a report, submitted by an anonymous reader: It's the latest in a series of public stands made by Google employees against aspects of the company culture. A coordinated walkout by employees around the globe protesting discrimination and sexual harassment at Google led the company to end forced arbitration for claims. Last month, several hundred employees signed onto a letter protesting the company's censored search efforts in China. A Bloomberg report in July said Alphabet had more contractors than direct employees this year, for the first time ever.

Google's mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.' But the company fails to meet this standard within its own workplace. Google routinely denies [temporary, vendor, and contract workers] access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives," the letter published Wednesday says. The latest letter is signed only by "TVCs at Google" and does not indicate the number of employees backing the effort. Google did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.

Comments

Irony

[sycodon]

Google constantly talks about Social Justice when it appears they need a bit of Social Justice applied to them.

Re:Irony

[Mashiki]

It's basically ivory tower, champagne socialists, limousine liberals and so forth in action. Don't know why this is a surprise for so many people.

Re:Irony

[colonslash]

Yes, how dare they pay people for work at a price those people accept. Or did I miss the part where this was forced labor?

Re:Irony

[Mashiki]

Champagne socialists are still a thousand times better than the I've-got-mine-go-fuck-yourselves conservatives littering this place.

So, the person so massively out of touch that they believe they have the right to your money, the right to restrict your speech, the right to dictate how you live. Are better then the people who want to be left the fuck alone.

That's brilliant.

Re:Trump

[olsmeister]

It is bred into current management dogma that you *never* do that. You drive the company off the cliff before you do that. You have a parachute, the workers do not.

Re: Good.

[WindBourne]

The 18 months is due to law suit done at us west back in the 80s. Contractor had worked there for 10 years, then was let go in a round of layoffs. Since she had been there so long and was treated like employee, lawyer argued she was owed sal/benefits of employee . She won. So companies boot contractors at 18 months and then can rehire at 24. In addition, they purposely will not treat you 100% like employee.

Re:Trump

[lgw]

If the economy was doing that well, companies would be falling over themselves trying to retain workers by increasing compensation packages. That has not happened yet.

You're looking at a trailing indicator. Labor now has "pricing power". Clearly these contractors feel they might succeed in their demands for a raise (and I have a lot of sympathy for them - Google invented this shitty classist system that goes far beyond how the other tech giants use contractors).

The usual business cycle from the bottom is:

1. Consumers stop being so scared, start fixing problems they've been living with.
2. Businesses stop being so scared, start hiring again, and strategic acquisitions.
3. Workers stop being so scared, start asking for the rasies they didn't get during the downturn.
4. Hiring going full bore, workers getting raises, consumers spend on credit like the good times will last forever, businesses overextend like the good times will last forever.
5. "Natural" inflation (unrelated to govt spending) becomes meaningful, cost of borrowing goes up.
6. Everyone is over-leveraged and over-extended when the downturn starts.
7. Kaboom! Everyone is scared, consumers stop spending, businesses stop spending.

We're at 3. Lots of run left in this business cycle. 2000-2013 were like the mid-60s through the 70s: a business cycle without a real upturn, but that's not usual.

Re:As a Google shareholder let me say

[bobbied]

Tough. Don't like it? Quit and get a job somewhere else. You are not employees and you should not be treated like employees.

I disagree... They are doing what they should be doing. If you don't like your compensation package, ASK for better. If you don't get what you want and still think it's unfair, THEN move on.

A wise man once told me, "You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate." I say let them ask.

Social Justice is the left wing equivalent to

[rsilvergun]

the Southern Strategy. It's how the economically right wing pundits in our midst distract us from economic issues. The people pushing for it were never left wing, but they needed something to get the working class off their back.

Take "equal pay for women" as an issue. Ok, we can debate if women are getting less pay or not. But even the most extreme estimates say 3%. Meanwhile workers in general make 20% less than they did 40 years ago. Folks are fighting over 3% while they've lost 20%. It's nuts.

OTOH the reverse (anti-SJW) is just as bad. There's a youtuber called "Cult of Dusty" that's got a series on how the alt-right has pivoted to 24/7 anti-SJW. Meanwhile the Evangelicals (who the alt-right, being skeptics, traditionally didn't get along with) are using the alt-right to win political offices all over.

The only consistently sane voice I know in all this has been Bernie Sanders, who's been trying to get the working class to stop fighting over scraps and go after the meat.

No one's _making_ you live in the company town

[rsilvergun]

You're free to wander out into the wilderness and get eaten by a bear or die in the winter...

People gave up on slavery in the 1800s not because they were suddenly moral beings but because wage slaves were a better deal. You didn't have to sink a ton of capital into a slave. If a wage slave got tore up in your factories you didn't care, you just got another one.

Contract workers are going to be the kinds of workers google needs but that they can easily replace. Google, along with the other major companies, are the ones that set the rules. The sheer amount of mergers and acquisitions going on means we have de-facto monopolies. The complete lack of any anti-trust enforcement in regards to workers (there's a tiny bit coming out of Europe for _consumers_) and the murder of Unions (not a death, they were killed) means these workers are running out of options.

TL;DR; If a small group of companies has all the jobs and can easily crush competitors then you no longer have a choice. That's why Unions exist. This is the start (re-start?) of Unionizing. Google's going to do everything to crush it. Google is not your friend. No company is. There is _always_ an adversarial role between worker and boss. Remember that.