Better one here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google-workers...
> These 80 employees who work as analysts and trainers for Google’s shopping product
To me, this sounds like low skilled labor.
> Most of the employees organizing hold college degrees, get paid as little as $40,000 a year, and don’t receive sick days or many of the other perks that direct Google employees get.
"perks that direct Google employees get" is irrelevant at best.
The first COL calculator I found (ie, first google hit, let's assume google didn't suddenly game this result) says pittsburgh is 1/3 the cost of SF. $40k = $120k. This is not bad at all (?) for such low skilled labor, if the "COL curve" is linear down to $40k. Also, they say "as little as", so we know that's the floor, not the median. (Shame on the editor for presenting it that way.)
The lack of sick days isn't that bad if the employees have health benefits and are not penalized for sick time off. (Just take away 1-2 weeks of salary -- the typical amount of sick days one would get.) However, if they don't have sick days, I have doubts about the quality of their health benefits and maybe they don't even have 401k?