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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Reminding people that took a paying job out of a need to get paid that they should expect to be treated as less human than full-time employees assumes that they are somehow unaware of this. Every contractor I've worked with in the past 5 years clearly understood the fragility of their situation, while the employees working with them often did not.

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> treated as less human

Keep it civil? Nobody said anything about "less human". That's a vile straw man.

> treated as extra-disposable and second class

I suppose it depends on the eye of the beholder. Humans aren't disposable.

The position is disposable, not the person.

I was let go with no notice and not even a bag to take my shit home while the asshat recruiting manager who hired me and got a promotion

For such statements we must observe the speech which is uttered forth from the motion of hands and not the motion of lips.

This is a web forum that uses characters submitted in a form textarea to communicate. Whether those comments are posted by hand or by assistive technologies such as text-to-speech or mouth control is not relevant.

I used to be a contract worker in tech. If you'd like to learn more about why I feel that way, and why those feelings come up for me when reading the comment I replied to, then I would normally encourage asking. You chose the "this is conversational warfare" approach instead, so there isn't anything I can usefully say about that topic in reply.

"extra-disposable and second class"

It's not a straw man. It's in there in the original comment.

Second class employee does not, in any way, imply less than human. If there are FTE and Contractors, and you have to lay people off, the Contractors come first. The commitments you've made to each are different. That doesn't mean they are less human, or that you don't feel bad that you need to let them go. But sometimes, you have to let people go, and you have to choose which people.

You seem to explicitly ignore the “extra-disposable” modifier used with “second-class”. Curious.

No seriously you're not treated with dignity which is less than any human deserves

I just don't understand this argument. As a contractor, you are hired with the understanding that, if someone needs to be let go, it is you before the FTEs. In general, you're paid more as contractor than as an FTE, and that's one of the reasons.

There is nothing about that that implies you're not treated with dignity.

Yes it's not intrinsic to the relationship per se but in the implementation.

Contractors are treated with less dignity than they deserve on a number of fronts

As a contractor and even as an employee I've been treated with less dignity than I deserve especially when being let go on a moment's notice and treated like a plague carrier the minute I'm terminated

Your comment that I was replying to did not say "less than human." You said "less human."

Being treated as "extra disposable and second class" is being treated as less human than a FTE. It's up in the air whether that also means they were being treated as "less than human."

I've worked on contract before. Just shake my hand and tell me you don't need more right now. Don't feel bad, you've been paying me to offer that option without drama. You won't scale up enough if you're afraid to scale back down.

Sure! I know most people who have been through the experience of being a contractor are well-aware, but not everyone has had that experience and not everyone one of the 2000 unfortunate people will have clearly understood the risks before accepting the offer. Some may have even expected to be eventually hired due to unscrupulous recruiters. The tech recruiting industry is rife with shysters.

You seem like you may have been burned in the past and I think setting clear expectations up front can help. We used to tell our contracting candidates "The full-time staff will judge you differently than they judge one of their own so be prepared to dress better, work harder and be recognized for it less." But lots of people already understood that and there were plenty that really preferred the flexibility and variety of contracts and felt bored and trapped as FTE. People can have different life priorities than we do.

I think my agency was one of the good ones, but it was still rare that I was offering someone a clear career boost instead of a placeholder or a way to pay the bills. But bills need paying too. We used to be explicit about that and tell our contractors to keep looking for full-time work and treat the contract as a gap-fill and that we would cheer them on and gladly serve as a reference if they found better work. Our idea was that contractors who find dream jobs turn into eventual hiring managers who remember that we were honest.

And I see a vibrant discussion of language and rhetorics below:) I do want to clarify that I meant the position is disposable and that you are a second class citizen in the context of the first class FTEs. If anything in this situation feels dehumanizing it's due to the modern corporate philosophy of labor as resource. I'm out of recruiting now and my mental health and perception of self-worth are much improved for the change.

Doesn't make them any less human to point out they took a known risk.

At least in my part of the country, Contract workers are paid a premium over FTEs because of that risk. Broadly speaking the more 'secure' the contract job (i.e. years vs months) the less this differential in pay is, but I know plenty of people who specifically do contract work knowing that risk but finding the payoff worth it.

The entitlement is real and I don't even understand how full time employees can get so comfortable when they're just as precariously positioned in many cases

But they certainly don't go out of their way to help contractors or each other unless it's to complain about the company at least that is all I've ever witnessed

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