Senators demand Google make contractors full-time employees after 6 months

It’s not even just tech companies - one of my good friends is a video editor at one of the big cable news networks, and has been a 40-hour contractor for 7 years now, with others in the team being there longer.

>In the UK there's the same law, after 3 months a temp contractor needs to be given the same rights as a full-time employee, what happens?

To clarify, this applies to agency workers. Not contractors.

Arguably that is the way it is supposed to work. It means that any job in which the startup time (i.e. how long it takes to become “effective”) is relatively long basically can’t be fulfilled by temp positions. In other words, those types of jobs would need to be fulfilled by full time employees. Of course as you say the rest of people with more generic/widely applicable skills (which basically is a contractor) will be let go at week 11, but they should be able to find something else.

Of course the system isn’t perfect and surely some of those more generic skilled workers would prefer to stay longer, but it sounds like your description of the system is the way it’s intended to be.

Think of it as “doing due diligence”. They’re positioning themselves against what is seen as a worker-exploiting labor tactic that abuses a policy loophole, knowing full well that Google’s priority of bottom line profits will likely take precedence over acknowledging their request. If Google blinks and changes their hiring practices, state and federal labor regulators could pounce on the de facto admission of guilt and charge back pay with penalties and punish the rest of the contractor-abusers industry too. If Google does not blink, the senators can rightfully say that they tried to play nice and must now proceed to use their role as senators to altering labor law to make this abuse illegal. It’s not a “lazy request” so much as a “gauntlet softly thrown”.