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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

There's no "trick" about it. That's literally the way business has always worked since the first private companies were established.

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Actually no, this changed as a result of a lawsuit at MicroSoft where contractors were hired directly as contractors with no firewall firm. They worked at MS for decades with zero benefits and then sued to get them.

This forced firms to then hire third party vendors who in turn 1099ed the "workers" to work at company X, including google.

I don't know why you're bringing up the Microsoft case. That was about independent contractors. The subjects of this article are mostly regular W-2 employees. They just happen to be employees of a different company.

Should we force every company to be vertically integrated and directly employ everyone who works at one of their facilities? It's just a ridiculous complaint.

I agree it would be silly to expect companies to do everything themselves, but the example was of contractors (recruiter in this case) doing similar work to and under the direction and control of a full-time employee, at the Google facility, for a long time (1 year). This is where labor laws come into play and why companies restrict temps from working long term. Just putting a contractor on a 3rd party's W2 doesn't mean you're free to do as you wish.

Now, if they took the entire recruiting work for that team and gave it to the outsourcing agency who did the job from their Florida office, it wouldn't be a problem. They could also do what Apple does and host all the contractors in a separate building with no contact with Apple employees https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-bla... but the optics of that isn't great either.

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