All of the big tech companies are taking advantage of this contractor situation, that is why California lawmakers are looking closely at whether this is exploitation.
Working on a company’s contracted projects doesn’t make someone an employee of that company. It seems well-understood in common situations like cleaning or construction but people seem to struggle to understand how it works when it comes to unfamiliar topics like data centers.
The situation in this article is no different. The company they’re complaining about isn’t actually Google, despite how much the article tries to be about big tech:
> But the company that recruited McNally was not Google; it was Modis Engineering,
In the good old days janitors used to be employees. Heck, even when I worked for the government the janitors were employees (but I believe even the janitors needed a security clearance.)
Makes sense because people might leave sensitive documents around.
I could be wrong, but I doubt that most janitorial contracting firms have a policy of firing people after two years and refusing to re-hire them for a set amount of time. However, if they do then that would be immoral for them to.
The truth is that no contracting company wants to lost people after two years. Why would any company voluntarily let go of their most experienced workers and go through all the trouble of hiring and training new ones? Who would actually want to perform that cycle over and over again for no possible benefit?
They’re not doing this to be evil. They’re doing this to comply with poorly thought out regulations. Blame the regulators for coming up with these arbitrary laws.
The contracting companies would definitely be retaining their most experienced contractors if they could.