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Comment by derekdahmer | Hacker News Reader

> A spokeswoman for Facebook said none of the company’s contingent or contract workers have access to facilities such as clinics, gyms, or bring-your-child-to-work days

One thing I liked about AirBnB was their entire staff including cafeteria workers and security guards were full-time employees who ate the same food, had access to the same facilities and events, and went through the first week 'bootcamp' alongside developers, HR, and upper management.

That doesn't solve the wage gap, but it does make a huge difference in developing empathy to see people you've had common experiences with at all levels of the organization.

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I don't know if this was a special circumstance, but I shared a table with a security guard during my noogler orientation. That made a similar impact on me (and we stay in touch even now, actually). But, at Google, there is also a strong differentiation between full time employees and everybody else (temps, vendors, contractors), with clear and consistently impressed rules about what non-FTEs are allowed to see and do.

After engineer pressure a few years ago Google opened their cafes and some other amenities to many of their contract staff; they used to be more restricted.

Why doesn't this happen more often?

If you give too many benefits to contractors, they become de-facto full time employees, and you have to pay for benefits and health insurance and all that stuff.

That happened back in the day with engineers at Google also. They hired a lot of contractors, but you could really only work 6 months out of the year, or else they'd have to classify you as full time with all the attendant benefits.

The food and fitness center costs are really a rounding error. Contractors also have to pay to use the shuttle, because again with the benefits/full-time or contractor designation.

I've been a full-time consultant/contractor since 2005 and felt like I was pretty familiar with the IRS classification rules, and this is new to me. Can you cite where you read this?

Sure.

If you take a look at https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/x-26-07.pdf, points 6, 13 and 14 are the most important.

If you give too many benefits to contractors, they could make a plausible case that they're full time employees and will be able to sue for back pay, benefits, and punitive damages. For instance, for point 13, you could argue that a free shuttle would be paying for your travel expenses.

It's definitely a gray area, but large companies have very deep pockets and a very public lawsuit would harm them in ways that would not harm a startup without much money, and policies get made. Google I think is erring on the side of caution, hence selective caps on benefits and employment duration. "He only works for us 50% of the time, there is no way he's an employee."

EDIT:

And free shuttles could also run afoul of point 9 and point 7, which is doing work on the employer's premises and an expectation of certain hours to be kept. A case could be made that if you're providing transportation to a location, and it's only available for a few hours, there's a certain expectation that you're expected to be in a certain place at a certain time.

I'm familiar with this list but unfamiliar with the mapping you're making to contractors getting access to facilities and amenities. The specific items you're pointing out apply far more to the normal course of the work contractors do than they do to cafeteria access.

I'm going to push a little further back on this point, because the contractors we're talking about don't work for Facebook. They work for body shop firms, at arms length remove from Facebook.

Another problem I'm having with this logic is that I've done long-term staff aug gigs for companies, direct 1099, and been given access to facilities and amenities.

I think we're talking at cross purposes here.

Microsoft got burned badly in a comment on this thread, because some contractors effectively wanted to upgrade their contractual status after working there for a while. That led them to update their HR policies to make sure there was no such confusion.

For what it's worth, I am pretty sure that Google still provides cafeteria access for food to the cafeteria work, obviously after service hours.

Another thing to bear in mind is that this is an HR policy for Facebook (I can't speak to Facebook and the actual policy).

They don't really have to make sense, HR policies are there to shield the company from any possible liability and/or the possibility of the body shop's company getting their contract terminated. The spectre of the Microsoft lawsuit is probably likely to forbid certain practices for contractors, direct or through a hiring agency.

Also, for most restaurants, you're not allowed to take food home from the serving line after your shift. If you can take food home from the serving line, that (in the company's perspective) tends to create a perverse incentive for making more food and driving up supply costs for no benefit to the company.

There are many different perspectives for different companies. Simply saying that you've not encountered anything like this is not an indicative of general industry practices. Also, you were contracting directly with the company. You were probably paid better than the food service workers. If you're making under 20 an hour, the incentives for you to sue are far greater than if you were extremely well paid and should not rock the boat.

Finally, if you're spending all your time onsite working for just one employer for extended hours and periods of times, even if you have a contracting company between you and the company, if you do it for long enough and get enough benefits, you can claim that you were actually an employee of the parent company. Sort of like a common law wife. It makes sense that you would want to put up an even higher wall between you and third party contractors.

I was at Microsoft years ago and there was a transition away from providing similar perks to contractors due to a lawsuit.

https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...

Microsoft got burned badly on misclassification, but amenities had nothing to do with it: their contractors effectively were employees, with no material difference between FTEs and contractors in terms of how was work delivered and what expectations were. (I've done a very little bit of contracting work for MSFT, FWIW).

I'm not surprised if MSFT overcorrected after that shitstorm.

But for what it's worth, my understanding is that v-badges at MSFT still get access to facilities!

For more background on this (dating back to the halycon years of 1986), see 'grellas's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1137930

Though the notion that an IRS reclassification caused an employment practices lawsuit demanding access to e.g. retirement benefits for a reclassified independent contractor is a bit amusing, if terrifying when considered from an employer's perspective.

Because the more you treat contractors as employees (including giving them the same benefits), the more likely it is that they'll sue you claiming they really are full-time employees and therefore deserve more.

Exactly that happened to Microsoft (https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...). Microsoft lost and, as part of preventing such lawsuits in the future, they limited things that are available to contractors.

Ianal, but I thought that contractors normally get paid more than FTE, for the risk contacting implies.

Seems to me that a company is justified in treating them differently.

They do normally if they are skilled "consultant" type gigs. In recent years though, using contractors instead of FTEs has been popular as a trick to get cheap labor - it's largely one of the foundations of the so-called "gig economy". As an example, this is most likely one reason why Uber spends such large amounts of money fighting any attempt to re-classify their drivers as FTEs in several different countries.

Many countries have some kind of legal framework that tries to prevent exploitation of unskilled employees by classifying them as self-employed contractors instead. Claiming your employees are contractors is sometimes abused as a way to avoid a bunch of expensive things employees might have a statutory entitlement to, like sick pay, holiday allowances etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-t...

The market pays some contractors more than full-time employees, but no regulation forces it to, and there are classes of contractors that make less, especially when taxes and benefits are accounted for, than FTEs.

Exactly --the whole Microsoft lawsuit in the early 2000s? Contractors were being treated too nicely such they legally could look like employees.

Also, food can be considered part of compensation for tax purposes --which is why some companies only allow x-number of per-employee "guests" per month.

Security personnel are somewhat special. They need to keep temps/vendors/contractors away from sensitive information covered by NDAs for full time employees. This necessitates those security guards being exposed to the sensitive information in question. Therefore, security folks are full time employees while cafeteria and gbus staff are not.

All the security folks in Kirkland have red TVC badges. They also get their lunch at the cafes (But may be billed for it? Don't know how that works out for TVCs.)

100% true.

I was a FTE there a few years ago. If you were a TVC (temp, vendor or contractor), you got no access to ANYTHING. Security guards were always nearby the cafes checking people's badges and clearing them through.

I want to second this, as a former Airbnb employee -- it really did make a visible difference in enthusiasm, sense of community, and just overall work satisfaction.

Thanks for mentioning this example. Every time I see complaints of how FB (or any big company) should not be using contractors, I'm at a loss to think of companies that employ this kind of support staff. I think most of the companies I've worked have generally outsourced cafeteria and janitorial work, albeit these companies were in much more affordable metros.

It's a lost opportunity that companies who view themselves as socially progressive and invest heavily in marketing and PR around inclusivity then continue inadvertently maintaining an internal class system of knowledge vs service workers.

It's almost like they value the image of being progressive more than actually being progressive.

It's almost like market demands them to be seen as progressive.

you say that as if it's a bad thing?

See also senior and older FB engineers being discouraged from participating in perks and events intended for younger and junior employees because FB can multitask at sucking.

> See also senior and older FB engineers being discouraged from participating in perks and events intended for younger and junior employees because FB can multitask at sucking.

Can you elaborate? I don't recall ever seeing anything of the sort while I worked there.

There are all sorts of wonderful shop classes and related perks at FB. Older and senior talent in my experience is discouraged from attending these classes. Maybe they weren't always that way or maybe someone smacked them with a clue bat over that behavior, don't know...

"shop classes"? like... woodworking?

...and silkscreening - https://www.facebook.com/analoglab/

I'm over 40 and haven't noticed this at all. If anything the median age in the woodshop classes I took was well above the company's.

Interesting, either times have changed, or, much like Google, you're in a big company and your experience all comes down to the team you join. Either way, great info, thanks!

are you just making this stuff up? it's totally wrong. and if it did happen, there would be a public discussion about it very quickly.

Why don't you ask about this at an all-hands if you're so sure it's never happened or if you're so sure that everything stupid and wrong at large companies like Facebook gets addressed quickly?

I'm actually encouraged to hear others have had a different experience there. But there's plenty of stupid crap I've seen go down as well, much like other large companies. For not everything rises to the level of public discussion rather it becomes yet another papercut leading to the decision to depart.

[citation needed]

I've been at FB for almost a decade and have never seen anything that even remotely looked like what you are describing.

i'm old af @ fb and have no idea what you're talking about.

When I was at FB, I did several improv classes. I noticed a number of older engineers at them (40+). That was 2 years ago so maybe things have changed but I doubt it..

athenahealth did something similar. New hires all came in waves and every two weeks there was a new class at Point Lookout on the coast of Maine. Whether you were the new CTO or a call center rep working out of Atlanta, they would fly you up there for a week to get properly indoctrinated. It was a wholly positive experience and it really set the tone for the rest of my time working there.

Being allowed to access a health care clinic would provide much more than empathy, that would be a massive economic benefit when insurance costs are so high in the US.

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