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Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

Eh.. that's like saying "Can't blame me for cruelty to animals, the people I buy the meat from treat the animals cruelly; not me."

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You can hold multiple people accountable, but I'm pretty sure Google should be less accountable than the outsourcing companies.

If you want to hold major companies accountable for the outsourcing companies they hire, fine, make a regulatory push for that, but you have to fix the outsourcing companies first before you can seriously argue for that or you're just making major companies pay for the problems of outsourcing companies.

Would you seriously argue for taxing people for buying from animal-cruel farms without actually doing anything to those animal-cruel farms?

That's the problem. Outsourcing companies are not FIRST in line to be fixed according to this article.

The regulations already exist. Companies aren't allowed to classify contractors if they do work similar to a fulltime employee or what would be considered full-time work. Like work long term at the company site. The outsourcing happens by finding and taking advantage of loopholes with contracts, firing contractors after 18 months and betting the costs to settle a lawsuit is cheaper than paying benefits to 10s of thousands.

Sure, you can't hire somebody as a contractor to do full time work, but you can absolutely hire a different firm to do the work.

Those workers should be full time workers for the cleaning firm, but it doesn't mean that they are full time workers for Apple.

That is the loophole. Technically, it is possible to hire an outsourced firm to do the work if it is 100% turnkey outsourced and done outside of Apple. You often see this type of outsourcing happen with legal and creative type work.

However, more often, the contractors are onsite and doing exactly what other Apple employees do and are managed by fulltime employees of Apple. In this case the law says those contractors should have been classified as employees of Apple not the contracting firm, even if their employment contract says otherwise. see Vizcaino v. Microsoft Corp

Well, the major companies are the one pushing to pay less and less the outsourcing companies, aren't they?

I really want to know what BigCorp will chose the first between a company paying janitors above minimum wage and a company offering them to cut their cost on janitors by 30% (but janitors gets only enough to scrape by). My experience is that they will jump on the cheaper offer (so someone can get a bonus), and the janitors can go fuck themselves - and so can the quality of their work. It happens all the time, and not only with janitors.

Arguing that the fault rests (only) with the outsourcing companies is the same thing as arguing the fault of people getting low salaries rests (only) on those people. It may be technically true, but it seems pretty naive to me.

I think they're both equally culpable; the customer for making pricing a race to the bottom and the service provider for choosing to play said game.

The customer could choose to consider the treatment of the workers a priority in selecting service providers, and the service provider could choose to refuse to exploit their workers just to secure deals, but neither of them have any real incentive to do so. It's not illegal to shop primarily by price. It's not illegal to hire PT workers even when FT would be viable.

I do agree, though, that the problem is a lack of regulation; unfettered capitalism really does have a evil end game.

This problem happens when a leading company decides to use contractors to lower its cost. All other companies that are competing with it now have to do the same or they operate at a disadvantage. The workers then lose any leverage because they now can only pick between multiple contract jobs.

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