Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers | Hacker News Reader

Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

theguardian.com

576 pointsjdkee237 comments

Personal Googler story: In Ads and in Search, at least as of 2010 or so, Google employed independent companies who hired "raters" to provide "ground truth" for the ML systems. For example, they would rate proposed ads for a given query, so that the ML system could learn from their "truth". For Search, they'd rate proposed search results for a given query. There was a whole pipeline to bring in the raters' results and use them.

Those "raters" were contractors to the independent companies, and had no Google privileges at all. They couldn't come to campus and eat at the cafes, for example. They had no direct contact with any Google employees. I helped a relative get hired as one of those. This was about 11 years ago.

These outside companies had minimal oversight from Google, by design. My cousin joined the Search rater company and was given a test problem, which was timed and they had max times allowed. When she finished, they said "sorry, you took too long, we're not paying you."

I raised a stink and HR sent a representative to meet with the Search people. I sat in. The Search people were obnoxious little corporate toadies who claimed they couldn't interfere with any particular contractor's case, because of the legal separation requirements.

I so enjoyed watching the HR rep calmly and politely tell them, "That's great! Good job, you guys! But you know... when you hire someone and they don't do a good job, your remedy is to fire them. Not to refuse to pay."

She got paid.

I can't make any general statements about what happens to everyone, but in this particular case, I can't complain at all about HR's handling.

I can't make any general statements about what happens to everyone, but in this particular case, I can't complain at all about HR's handling.

That's kind of the exception that proves the rule, you think?

That is, your outlining of the situation gives a strong suggestion that this sort of thing is common and unless the contractor has pull (say, a relative that works at Google), they can't do anything.

I've always thought the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is nonsense, btw. There's no such "proof."

I think the intent behind the modern usage of "the exception that proves the rule" is that:

a) the rule is a heuristic, not a hard-and-fast rule, and

b) the notability of exceptions suggests that the heuristic is pretty good.

In other words, if the exception is, in fact, exceptional, it reinforces that the heuristic is reasonably valid for non-exceptional cases.

In this case, the fact that it took the intervention of the family-friend-who-works-at-Google-HQ to resolve a pay dispute is an exceptional circumstance, and reinforces that for most people, because presumably most people don't have a family friend who works at Google HQ, there is no recourse to pay disputes.

Hence, the exception—by being exceptional—proves the heuristic rule that most employees of these contractor corps have little power to negotiate for their rights.

And the "proof" used is an archaic term that means "test". The same word occurs in discussing alcohol strength ("100 proof") and in "proof standard" (the standard[1] that you use to compare against).

The German cognate would be "prüfen", the Swedish probably "pröva".

So, the exception tests the rule.

[1] And the standard is, of course, a reference exemplar of some sort.

Yeah, or for example in Dutch 'scheikundeproef' or 'natuurkundeproef' which we did at high school: a test involving the laws of chemistry or physics respectively.

That’s a great explanation.

Another commonly misused phrase is "begging the question" which you have done here. It means "assuming that which you need to prove."

You have no proof that it was exceptional. All you have is one case. You have no idea what other people in pay disputes end up doing.

First off, I was just framing the parent’s post in the modern usage of “exception that proves the rule” and not making any claims myself, so perhaps reconsider who’s making unfounded assumptions here.

> You have no idea what other people in pay disputes end up doing.

But also this is a super weak argument. I don’t have “no idea”—I have an educated guess that most people don’t have family friends who work at Google. Most people don’t have the resources to sue an employer over a few hours of unpaid labor. Wage theft is one of the most extensive unprosecuted crimes, that’s been studied and shown many times.

Are you suggesting that one should assume that most low-level employees in pay disputes get happy outcomes? That seems…naive.

The question people are asking is "How would your relative have gotten paid if you hadn't worked at Google"?

This kind of pedantry about which words people use to make an argument is literally garbage.

To continue the spirit of the many nested comments now going back and forth:

Metaphorically.

I think you mean figuratively garbage. Words can only be literally garbage if they're printed on a page which is then disposed of.

I mean, while we're being pedantic we may as well get it right.

People are allowed to use a phrase for its literal meaning instead of the traditional idiomatic meaning.

"beg the question" does not have a literal meaning. It makes no sense unless you're so used to hearing it used that way.

"beg" often means "beg for". "This situation begs for the question:" is a completely reasonable way to start a sentence.

Or to go with synonyms. Solicits the question. Entreats the question. These are the literal meanings of the words, and they work fine.

It is an old phrase. In this case, "proves" means something more like "tests". In modern terms, I'd say it's something like, "You don't really know you have a rule until someone has tested it by claiming an exception." e.g., setting a child's bedtime to 9pm will pose no challenge if they voluntarily go to bed at 8:30, it isn't until the exception comes along that you know whether or not you really have a rule.

I think the phrase 'proofing yeast' in bread making has the same connotations - you're testing that the yeast is still alive.

Off-topic here, but since I'm often making pizza dough:

I always wondered about that word. If you want to test yeast, you just put it in some sugar water & see if it foams.

But then, I guess you can't do that if it's mixed with flour & other stuff?

The word "prove" used to also encompass the meaning of "challenge" or "put to the test".

It still retains that archaic meaning in the phrase you mentioned and terms like "proving grounds".

Edit:

And like so many other proverbs like "A few bad apples", "Blood is thicker than water", "Carpe diem", "The exception proves the rule" means exactly the opposite of what most people think it does.

In the case of “blood is thicker than water,” unfortunately, the more historically common understanding is also its most common understanding today, and has been for so many centuries that we dont actually know if it originated with its original meaning or it’s inverse.

I’m bringing this up because, for many years, I was one of the folk who spread the idea that it actually was supposed to mean “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” But there’s no strong historical basis for this, lovely as the idea may be.

—

As for the “bad apple” one, I didn’t realize that it was commonly misunderstood. I always felt like someone mentioning that someone was “a bad apple” was an almost violent accusation: the person needed to be extricated from the group, less the group become infected by their corruption. I am now trying to think back to times when I’ve heard this one used and wondering if I misunderstood the intent.

> The word "prove" used to also encompass the meaning of "challenge" or "put to the test".

Yes but "There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way.", citations located at wikipedia.

So I think it makes more sense to go with the interpretation of "if someone lists an exception, then that's proof of a more general rule that it's an exception from". But with that use, something specifically has to be an exception. Anyone applying "exception proves the rule" to an anecdote is using it wrong.

Also "proof reading" and "100 proof whisky".

And proofing dough.

The exception that proves the rule is from a legal argument by Cicero.

It means that if someone bothers to write an exception in a law, say e.g. "but in case window is broken by stone smaller than 1 cm in diameter, then it's the owner of the window that should pay reparations", then in the general case it's likely the thrower of the stone that pays, otherwise there would have been no point in adding so specific an exception.

This is the correct answer. "Exception proves the rule" = a documented exception is an evidence that a general rule exists.

When you see text "kids under age of 3 years don't have to pay", you can conclude that older people are supposed to pay.

The analogy for Google situation would be if hypothetically someone found an internal e-mail written by the boss of Google HR department saying "contractors who have relatives in Google, or who have published their story on Hacker News front page, need to be fully paid for their work". Then we could conclude that other contractors typically don't get fully paid, even if there is nothing in the e-mail saying that.

It's so misused most of the time. The clearest, correct example of it I've seen is a sign that says "No Parking from 10PM to 5AM". This is an exception to the otherwise unstated rule that parking is allowed during all other times, therefore proving it exists.

I disagree with most of the commenters that want to apply the phrase to heuristic claims.

This is currently the only reply that's downvoted below zero, but this is also the only reply that matches the definition of the phrase as I understood it.

The phrase is misunderstood. Historically "Proof" is contextually meaning the nature of the test, not passing it. "failed the test"-proof has been "disproved" by this exception, which shows a belief does not generally apply. I'm not explaining this very well but a Google search will throw up better explanations.

Some how it's morphed to colloquially mean "yes, that one exception aside, I'm right and you're wrong" as if the negative somehow reinforces the positive..

The phrase "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" helps understand this. The pudding may prove to be bad or good. Find which proof by eating it.

jerf's explanation makes sense. The negative certainly does not reinforce the positive.

Yes. They said it better. It certainly doesn't reinforce the positive, yet people seem to insist on using it as if it does. "Well, yes, that penny did land on it's edge but the exception proves the rule it had to be either heads or tails" type statements abound. No.. the exception proved pennies have three states not two: your argument is busted.

Exception proves the rule comes from Roman law: if there is a sign saying you can’t park here on Saturdays, it means that you can park here on any other day.

I was taught it comes from logic, and argumentation: the act of stating an exception proves a rule as stated (a rule is a claim to an axiom) is wrong. So it's in logic and philosophy, not Roman law.

If you’re reading a guide book and it specifically says: “Use spell X to ability kill this boss” the implication is you can’t instantly kill other bosses by using ability X.

Logically the statement says nothing beyond what it says, but implicitly by providing the exception you’re stating that the general rule is different.

It’s a perfectly rational linguistic argument, though often misused outside of that context.

The "rule" is the null hypothesis. The exception is a result about three standard deviations from the null hypothesis. Finding such an exception result means you can not reject the null hypothesis.

The argument is that not being able to reject the null hypothesis means that the null hypothesis is correct. This is an invalid argument. We're sorry but we can not accept your submission at this time.

Agreed. It is infuriating because it is internally inconsistent on its face. The way logic works, an exception disproves the rule. Surprise, surprise.

No. It is a legal principle. If there is a sign stating: "Parking prohibited 03am - 07am" then that implies that parking is allowed outside that window of time.

I can summarize OPs post even more succinctly: Nepotism in google only way to get paid.

  These outside companies had minimal oversight from Google, by design.

Could this be so that the google corporate toadies could bid out the lowest possible price, yet remain isolated from the predictably unethical, shoddy, or even illegal practices of the cut-throat priced contracting companies?

It just seems strange that you’re lauding google HR, when your description suggests google was complicit, if not directly responsible, for the whole setup.

The mechanism of distancing yourself from crime is explained here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fB4gvoooNYa4t56S/power-buys...

For a large company it often makes little sense to directly hire temp employees and/or vet contractors.

The fact that a cottage industry of less than law abiding contracting agencies provide services to Google is more an issue of CA's employee protection laws than Google's responsibility.

Consider the current/default rate of wage theft via salary employees not paid for overtime despite being eligible; it's rampant in the SE industry because it's logistically easier to pay someone 10% more than to keep track of occasional overtime.

Therefore whenever a large company contracts something out to a smaller company, you should immediate expect more shady practices. My point is that Google's only role in this case is making something unknown... known - plenty of small shops unrelated to FAANGs break the same rules.

For contractors to avoid classification as employees you need to be pretty hands off - the more you tell them how to do their jobs the more likely they are to be classified as employees if such a question arises. I don’t think immediately assuming bad faith is fair here (or there or anywhere really).

I used to do this kind of work and found that the worst thing about it was actually having too much time. After a while I had read and understood all of the documentation and had a complete mental model, so tasks would take half the time. However, if I got through tasks too fast I'd just be paid the same and bring down the average time for everyone else. So I had this mind numbing stop-start process that felt so pointless.

Sorry, I’m not following. Which company did the HR rep belong to? Which company did the ”corporate toadies” belong to? Perhaps I’m just confused how you were able to have such a direct influence on the internal goings on of a supposedly independent company.

The story does not make sense to me either. Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved in a labor issue at company they contracted with and claiming are not google employees.

> "Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved "

.. and yet, it happened. I was there. Maybe you should look up "slave labor and clothing factories" or "janitorial service companies."

A modern company that contracts with another company to do something for them does not get to completely wash its hands of their practices. Up to a point, they do, but when the contractor egregiously violates the law, then they usually get involved anyway. Judges and juries and regulatory officials and employees take a very dim view of illegal conduct by your contractors. It reflects badly on you.

In this case, I don't know what happened afterwards, but I would guess that Google amended its contracts with those companies to better regulate cases like this. Just a guess.

Maybe they even intervened without mentioning my cousin's name -- maybe they just said "hey, in general, you can't violate labor laws, and you definitely can't refuse to pay people for being too slow!"

>A modern company that contracts with another company to do something for them does not get to completely wash its hands of their practices

They do if they want to maintain their position that the employees of the contracting firm are not their own employees.

If an employee is not getting paid by an employer, that is between the employee, the employer, and the state department of labor.

Slave labor and clothing factories are not relevant in this case as those operate in other countries where the government's labor laws and enforcement are much less effective than the US.

Janitorial service companies is what I am referring to. If my company hires a janitorial service company for $x to perform janitorial tasks, then the janitors are clearly not my company's employees. But if my company now starts getting involved in compensation disputes between the janitorial service company and its janitor employees, now my company is risking wading into a dispute in which it has no need to and risks raising questions about whose employees the janitors really are.

Perhaps what you said really did happen, but I cannot find the motivation for people in Google's HR department to do so, especially if it was in a state like California with a pretty decent labor department that would undoubtedly support workers who did not get paid for time worked.

> If an employee is not getting paid by an employer, that is between the employee, the employer, and the state department of labor.

In NL you can forget about that. It use to be that you could stick some "fictional" company between you and your employees and get out of jail free for everything, including salaries. Jobs 1-4 hours per week made it extra unlikely for any employee to run the extra mile after they were left without a name, address or phone number after about 3 months. Taking the bankrupt company to court was expensive and unlikely to work. People don't take a 2 hour job unless they need the money.

Now the obligation to pay salaries applies all the way up the food chain.

HR is always involved with external contractors.

The way contracting usually work is that the contractor must submit timesheets daily or weekly to a supervisor at the parent company. The supervisor must approve the timesheet. The contractor will be paid the hours in the timesheet.

The story is a classic example where the manager (google employees) refused to acknowledge the hours for no valid reasons, preventing contractors from being paid.

Gotta escalate to HR to get paid and fill formal complaints against the bad manager.

That would be about compensation for the contracted firm itself though, which would make sense. I may have misunderstood the story as Google HR getting involved because the contracted firm did not pay an employee of the contracted firm.

The employer pays the contracting firm based on the timesheet, then the contracting firm pays the employee based on the timesheet/pay they were forwarded.

When there's a problem with the employee not being paid, the root cause often goes back to the employer blocking the pay in the first place.

No, not what happened. The contracting firm was officially "arms' length" from Google and no Google employees even knew my cousin's name.

However, it turns out that "arms' length" doesn't mean the contractor can get away with absolutely anything.

I can only comment in the general case, I don't know your personal situation obviously.

Contractors cannot be at arms length. There has to be an arrangement with the employer (Google here) and the contracting firms to pay. That means there has to be a timesheet for each employee. Could be filled by either party.

You said your cousin wasn't paid because somebody (implying from Google Search) said she took too long and refused to pay her. To me that sounds like a normal story where Google had to approve the hours/pay and they didn't. The excuse from Google employees that they are detached is fishy at best, they wouldn't be able to prevent payment if they were.

> Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved in a labor issue at company they contracted with and claiming are not google employees.

... as if it's better if they aren't involved? We are commenting on a story about that... seems like if they knew better, they would actually get involved to makes sure that this don't get out. The bare minimum is to pay the ones that complains, that way you at least minimize the risk of this getting out.

I find it a little strange that this anecdote that paints google in a good light is the most upvoted comment in this story, instead of the comment that highlights the fact that there are emails showing that google knew for certain that this was happening and decided against fixing it to "not increase costs" - knowingly stealing that money from employees.

I've worked for one of those companies and I don't understand this. It was about paying them for just a test problem? During an interview presumably? And you got involved with them through HR even given how completely separate they are?

On the actual jobs you get so many timed tasks that a single one wouldn't even stand out, really.

> "During an interview presumably"

No. They had an entrance exam, and my cousin had passed it and signed on.

But it was a single task they took too long on?

Was it Leapforce or Lionbridge? I used to do search rating for both of those.

1. So Google a was evil even before 2010? How strange.

2. Aren't Contractor like these fairly normal in Silicon Valley. Apple are the same as well. Even worst most contractor were told there is a chance of working inside Apple if your job was good enough.

3. Very rare HR does the right thing.

It's worth noting that their search and other services rely on something similar:

https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...

Probably HR did the math how to protect the company. A legal case is bad for reputation and might inspire others. Paying quietly is cheap.

There is no maths to do. The company has to pay for hours worked.

in CA if subcontractor or supplier don't get paid, even if there is an intermediate contractor layer[s], they still can put a lien on the property. I think it make sense to have a similar system for subcontractor employees to be able to go after the company which their labor was ultimately consumed by thus piercing the liability defense-in-depth layers made up of subcontractor company[ies] . That would make companies like Google to really care what kind of subcontractor they use similarly to how one takes great care choosing contractor for their property.

> Google executives have been aware since at least May 2019 that the company was failing to comply with local laws in the UK, Europe and Asia that mandate temporary workers be paid equal rates to full-time employees performing similar work, internal Google documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian show.

> But rather than immediately correct the errors, the company dragged its feet for more than two years, the documents show, citing concern about the increased cost to departments that rely heavily on temporary workers, potential exposure to legal claims, and fear of negative press attention.

As I keep saying: there’s nothing more dangerous than a company (or department in this case) that was once wildly profitable and is now merely profitable.

It’s absurd that even at places like Google, which has effectively infinite money, there’s still this present attitude of not being able to afford paying workers. Nuts.

It's not that they don't think they can afford to pay fairly. It's that the decision makers are incentivized to cut every possible cost and are rewarded for it with multimillion dollar bonuses.

Yes, you’re right. I worded my post for the sake of glibness and not clarity.

I think what’s particularly fascinating is not the relentless drive for more profits, that’s been hashed to death and I have nothing original to offer here, but how the internal narrative of “we can’t afford to pay them” holds in cases where it’s transparent bullshit. Of course Google can afford to pay its temp workers a fair wage, and of course they don’t want to. It’s just surprising that the story they tell themselves is so trivially falsifiable.

Maybe you were talking about other companies. Google is still wildly profitable.

> the company just set an all-time record revenue of $61.9 billion this quarter, and record profits for the fourth quarter in a row at $18.5 billion.

From https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-r...

Wow, at what point do their profits balloon enough that Google's moat is no longer intimidating enough to fend off a gold rush of people willing to pour heaps of money and ingenuity into outdoing their search product? I've been searching with Google since the beginning and it definitely feels worse than in the days of yore, yet they make more money than ever...

Who has access to the amount of data that Google does? Microsoft and Apple come to mind, but they are already profitable for their own reasons so may not want to risk their current profit centers doing the "shady" work Google is known for (not necessarily saying Google is evil/shady, but their products have a reputation).

Microsoft pretty clearly does "shady" stuff with all the Windows desktop telemetry and ads.

They don't make money at search, they make money on advertising.

Yes, a moat is not a profit centre, it is a cost centre. You appear to have misunderstood the point you replied to.

“Or department”

Regardless, the fear of marginally reducing profits drives companies to do a bunch of things that are fundamentally pretty gross.

You know what they say, though... you don't get infinite money by cutting a lot of checks.

Google is wildly profitable.

It's understandable that a company, crunched for cash, ends up in odd situations.

It's not acceptable when you're sitting on mountains of cash - and - claim to have some kind of moral situation in commerce.

They are profitable exactly because they don't pay workers the worth they produce. Profit is literally that.

Profit is the difference between the cost to produce a good or service and the revenue generated from it. Cost of labour is just one aspect of the cost to produce a good or service.

Google is exploitative because they don't fully compensate the value of labour used in production. This is wrong and damnable and illegal in any reasonable jurisdiction. Google is profitable. This is not wrong and commendable in most places. The concepts should not be conflated.

Its not really "dangerous" only because that wording implies another state of possible affairs that could be safer.

unfortunately, ceteris paribus, the tendency of a rate of profit to ultimately slow is one of the costs of a free market, there is not really a way out of it long term!

> Its not really "dangerous" only because that wording implies another state of possible affairs that could be safer.

I generally use this phrase in the context of companies being willing to do anything to get back to being wildly profitable. And in that case, yes, there is quite a bit of danger towards basically everyone else.

Where is this thing called "Free Market"?

I was recently reminded that Milton Friedman -- profit, err, prophet of Freedom Markets™ -- actively eschewed empiricism.

It's not that these sages didn't understand. They refused. They actively rejected understanding.

Our epistemological crisis, where we don't even have a shared reality, has ancient roots.

Competition from Facebook and now Amazon ad businesses eating away at profit margins

The crux is that one needs to be willing to pierce through the pretend veil of separation:

> “the correct outcome from a compliance perspective” and could place the staffing companies it contracts with “in a difficult position, legally and ethically”.

The systemic abuse of subcontracting companies to undermine the rule of law by these large corporations needs to stop. But it only will if executives at Google would face the same consequences as executives at the subcontractors (which tend to escape criminal punishments as well by hiding behind multiple shells and false ids).

In Korea subcontractors with limited liability for workplace accidents was a huge problem in construction. The law now holds contractors and subcontractors equally liable for workplace safety violations.

What is the mechanism by which an entity that has the resources to spend on wrist-slaps is prevented from just continuing the behavior forever? I notice this a lot, and it feels like there are these opportunities everywhere that are exploited by corporations who know they'll skate every time with minimal financial impact.

Agreed. Executives need to start getting personal punishment if we want corporate behavior to change.

Alternatively, start issuing fines such that it’s X percent of revenue plus Y percent of salary from all employees. Even a fine of 1% of annual pay would light a big angry fire under most employees, and perhaps incentivize them to stand up to the execs and refuse to follow illegal or unethical decisions.

You want to directly fine low level employees for the actions of execs? My god, no. That's such an evil idea.

They're fined indirectly with stock prices already, but man is your idea really bad.

All employees would include execs obviously. I admit it's unorthodox and might feel a little unfair, but I imagine for these big tech companies that are so often guilty of just ignoring the law and paying fines to make their problems "go away," having the employees be furious at the bosses would be a far, far more effective punishment.

In terms of dollars, I don't think it would take much to make the point. Suppose you set the fine to 0.5% of salary from all employees. Someone in an entry level job earning $40k would only owe $200. But they'd be really flipping mad and might quit over it. That scales up pretty well - a middle-manager at Facebook who makes $600k would owe $3k. Not enough to really affect their life, but enough to make them really pissed off and potentially bail on the company.

In the end, if we as society want corporations to follow the law, we have to start recognizing that corporations are made up of regular humans following incentives, and if the corporate shield means the people who work in the company and carry out its actions feel no personal consequences of illegal actions, then it's not surprising they'll ignore the law.

But what does fining the low level employees accomplish? They can't really change the direction of the company in many cases.

Thats not really true. The middle and lower layers of the company is where the actual work happens, and if the people carrying out the work suddenly perceive there’s a personal risk to doing illegal things - even if it’s just a small fine - they’re much more likely to push back or quit. Meanwhile upper management may not care about a billion dollar fine that their spreadsheet says is “worth it,” but their life will be miserable if all the employees underneath them are pissed off, 10% quit, and nobody wants to work there. It’s a much, much bigger risk to upper management to infuriate their workforce than it is to write a check.

That’s the thing I think most people don’t understand about large companies. Money is just a number, they’re playing a game with it. If the company pays a huge fine, all those folks are still rich and nothing bad happens to them, they just have a few different numbers on their spreadsheet. That’s why they don’t care. It’s not like a normal person getting fined, who then loses the opportunity to use their money for things that matter to them.

If we want to hold corporations accountable, we have to issue punishments to corporations that actually hurt their leaders.

That’s a fantastic way to make any employee shut up immediately the moment any form of inspector enters the building.

A fair point, but doesn't this happen already? My experience working in a large corporation is that there's a pervasive "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to outside auditors, inspectors, etc., as well as a mindset that "they're just here to make our life harder," via imposed red tape, controls, etc. If this was really an issue perhaps there could be a whistleblower provision stating that anyone who assists with an audit or investigation is exempt from any personal fines that may result.

I think my problem is that while I may be happy to throw my bosses boss under the bus (he has it coming), Jim from accounting has a family with 5 kids, and he really needs the money. So I’ll just keep quiet about everything.

I do agree there’s an us/them mentality, but that breaks down when people feel like they can air out their grievances against senior management without sinking the company itself.

That’s fair but this is why I’m suggesting token penalties. Like parking ticket sized. People are extremely loss averse, so that’s enough to really bother them (thus deter behavior) while it shouldn’t be enough to genuinely hurt Jim in accounting.

Penalize the owners of the company. Make 10% of all stock disappear into a legal black pit. The executives (many of whom are usually shareholders) will receive corrective action in good order. Word to the owners: make sure your capital is working ethically, or be prepared to pay the price.

The gdpr fine system has seemingly been very effective and convincing corporations to comply with laws. Maximum of 20% in revenue fines, enough to cause many businesses to recapitalize - wiping out shareholders and executives.

The mechanism is by assigning visible but not devastating (despite the public demand for schadenfreude) punishments to executives found culpable. The goal is to maximize reporting and to change the culture.

If the punishments are set too high, individual loyalties begin to dissuade reporting. You might not love your boss, but you might not want to see his kids lose their father. So executing executives has its downsides.

However, the sanctions must be visible so as to decrease the tendency for offenders to defend each other and entrench corruption. This is difficult because it means that people will still be employed (in less powerful roles) after being sanctioned for offenses many people find morally repulsive.

It's a difficult balancing act. Cultural factors play about as big of a role as incentives. Rick Scott's Medicare fraud is infamous but it didn't stop him from winning three statewide elections in Florida.

I think the important thing about the penalties is that any potential gains (and then some) are negated.

If someone does not pay their contractors enough, knocking them down a peg to the level of those contractors seems like an appropriate punishment.

They can work their way up again.

Penalties should be high enough, that even if 10% of the cases are uncovered, the fines become more expensive than actually working within all rules.

Also, a lot would be solved if responsible people would get punished too, especially if they knew about the illegal stuff, and didn't do anything.

One mechanism is to fine the CEOs in units of time rather than dollar. For example, the punishment can include 18 hour compulsory training for the Cxx executives that they have to attend in person over 3 days (6hr per day) so that they understand how to comply with the regulations.

Great idea! This should definitely require physical attendance in order to avoid loopholes.

Penalties just have to be set correctly.

If I don’t pay a parking meter I’m likely to lose up to 100x as much as I saved… if Google doesn’t pay its employees…

High potential punishment has never worked.

If your city has exactly 0 'meter maids' what does the 100x fine do to deter you? Nothing.

If your city is patrolling its meters with a frequency that guarantees you will be caught 100% of the time you will definitely not do it ever (if you knew or after being caught multiple times in a row) and the expenses for meter maid salaries would be exorbitant. No more money coming in.

Theres probably a hard to attain sweet spot where having the patrols brings in enough money to offset enough of the salaries and which also gives you the feeling of 'always getting caught' thus not making it worth your while.

> High potential punishment has never worked.

And then you talk about meter maids. What do meter maids have to do with Google not breaking labor laws?

Probability of the potential turning into reality. A high potential punishment in the parking ticket analogy is very unlikely with few or no "meter maids".

Their point is that high potential punishment alone isn't sufficient, but that it must be likely or inevitable as well.

This is something called an analogy. In particular I chose a "car analogy", which is a common technique. Sometimes when a non car analogy is used people smirkingly ask for or make up a car analogy even.

I could use a different one that would stir up much more controversial debate. What if stealing office supplies carried the death sentence? If you are guaranteed never to be caught how much of a deterrent would it be? If you get caught 100% of the time for that but all they do is to make you pay 10x what the supplies were worth?

Basically what I was trying to show that it's all about a combination of percentage of getting caught and the sentence. Only upping the possible sentence does not act as the deterrent people commonly attribute to it.

shrug i’ve usually got caught unless parking for a very short time, i think with computerized meters they must have some automatic systems that flag cars just by driving past with an enforcement vehicle, only do that during busy times and you have pretty decent enforcement and parking meters doing what they were designed to do

So then tell me if you've got caught nearly 100% of the time, are the fines just a slap on the wrist or why do you keep doing it?

(what I didn't say is that if all you get is 'you bad boy but please don't do it again' then 100% enforcement doesn't help either. That should be obvious)

Well the last parking ticket I got was a result of putting the wrong space number in the machine, I got them more frequently when I was younger and stupid or forgetful. (I had a bit of a problem with sleep and would park somewhere and take an unplanned nap and get a ticket).

In the cheaper ticket city I would freely not pay the meter more or less breaking even on cost, and now in a more expensive city I do unless i’m only intending to park for a few minutes.

the mechanism is turning the heat up to 11. Whatever money they saved, 20x it and fine them. Do it for every minor infraction until they comply. Drag their executives in front of a camera and make them issue a public apology. What are they gonna do, drop out of the entire European or Asian market?

The problem is just lack of political willingness to reign them in, nothing else.

The "wrist slaps" will make up for the entire amount that the offending party short-changed the workers and penalties on top of that not to mention the cost associated with litigation.

So it's not economical for the offending parties to continue such behavior.

> So it's not economical for the offending parties to continue such behavior.

Of course it is. The only needed change is to take adequate care to not leave incriminating evidence such as emails around.

This assumes a 100% success rate of catching such behavior.

Honestly, underpaying employees should be viewed no differently than any other for of theft, and executives willfully allowing it to happen ought to be facing time behind bars for it.

Wage theft is the largest form of theft

nothing will change until high level executives start getting thrown in jail

My question is, if it's so advantageous to employ people via onsite staffing firms (basically half of FAANG's workforce is employed this way), why doesn't Google stop directly employing people altogether?

Without fail, if it's a giant publicly-traded company, a huge percentage of the workforce will always be onsite vendors. It seems so bizarrely arbitrary where they decide to hire direct vs. contract.

And I'm not talking about janitors, I'm talking highly paid software engineers, product managers, etc working on the same teams with Google employees.

Based on the rates I've seen, I can't imagine it's cheaper than having direct employees. So I'm guessing its more about making it easier to fire people, harder to get sued by them, and offloading the hassle of benefits onto a third party. It's clearly legal in the US, so why not take that strategy with all employees.

Does anybody have insight as to when this trend started in corporate America and why it's only popular with big publicly traded companies?

When a company goes public, do they suddenly get a mandate from the Board that they have to start mass-hiring people through Adecco?

Based on stories of mailroom workers rising up to executive ranks in the past, this clearly wasn't true as recently as the 1970s.

There’s a perverse distaste for hiring FTE for bland, routine work or to fill roles that have year to year volatility. Microsoft was notorious for this in the 1980s and early 1990s. If you were a superstar programmer you got offered a full time job as an employee. If you were “just” a technical writer you’d go through the same recruiting process but get offered a contract through a third party.

From 1994-1999 I ran ibm.com (whatever that meant). For most of the five years it was just me, one other FTE, and a roving band of 5-10 contractors. Any time I suggested converting the contractors to FTE I got slapped down, even though it eventually meant the loss of a lot of talent.

All I can figure is that the companies want to avoid long term benefits commitments. Healthcare. Pensions or 401ks, etc. They rarely saved money, the burden rate for my team was easily 30-50% more than my burden rate (not that the individuals got that largess, it usually went to their "manager" in the contracting agency).

I guess it could be a practice that started when companies still gave out pensions.

Pensions were a massive burden (just look at the auto companies who still have massive pension liabilities), so it probably made a lot of sense back then.

But now that corporate America has eliminated pensions in favor of 401ks, the contractor/employee juggling just seems wildly inefficient for anybody who's not a janitor.

It feels like now its just a case of the sheep following the herd, for no one reason anymore.

Anybody I talk to about this gives a nebulous response that basically amounts to "Hell if I know, that's just the way everybody does it!"

It is so companies can lay off entire teams at a whim.

When I was at MSFT, one of the orgs I was in was infamous for having over 50% vendors. On more than one occasion entire teams would be laid off when budget cuts happened.

It is bad for FTE morale to regularly lay off 100 FTEs, less bad to lay off 100 vendors.

It's an interesting part of corporate culture. Large companies hate the process of firing employees for a number of reasons: staff moral, public perception, potential legal liability, etc. This applies whether it's individuals for performance reasons, or entire teams for economic reasons. To avoid this, there is often a lot of (bureaucratic and difficult) process to justify the hiring of a new FTE.

The corollary to this is that it's often a lot easier for a manager to hire a contractor or use an out-sourcing vendor, even if they don't see the requirements of the role being any different than that of a "permie" and even if it costs the company more money.

My suspicion is that it’s a way to dodge labor laws.

It is not defined benefit pensions or labor laws. It is cheaper to scale up and down expenses instead of firing people due to unemployment insurance premiums increasing when you lay people off due to lack of work who are then eligible for unemployment benefits. Also, benefits can get expensive if you also have to offer them to lower paid employees if they normally would not be able to get them at a different employer, due to non discrimination testing.

The benefits are a big one. This is definitely true at Microsoft where benefits are very good even by FAANG standards. Being able to skip those costs for workers that aren’t highly paid devs is definitely a factor in choosing contractors (or “vendors” in MSFT-speak) for many roles.

> the contractor/employee juggling just seems wildly inefficient

Not when HR has to tell an Executive how much money they saved by hiring contractors in order to justify their jobs. HR is one of the most despicable departments in every company. They are company designated Stasi. They provide no value but whatever it is they want in order to justify their paycheck.

It is known.

I think part of it is around what the HR organization is built for, construction companies that do self performed construction are used to hiring growing their workforce 10x and shrinking it down again.

I think the thinking at more knowledge based firms is that They want to Keep their W-2 employees people they perceive to be the top performers, that they want to keep retain long-term, and that have long-term potential at the firm, if the position is viewed to be more commodity ther can put them on contract with a staffing firm, and not have save marginally, but really mentally keep track of who long-term vs. temporary / commodity

The idea is that you employ for your competency and value add, and outsource the rest. So core R&D should be in house headed by a VP of engineering, janitorial services can be outsourced not headed by a VP of cleaning the offices. In the early days, outsourcing wasn’t done, so janitors were included in those earlier Microsoft millionaires.

In a way it makes sense: you want to focus your effort on producing your product, not on the best way to clean your office. The company you outsource to can focus on that, where they make their own profit serving multiple companies. Sometimes you don’t have a choice (eg foreign companies in some countries have to contract with specific firms to do their security, they can’t have it in house).

The line gets blurry for jobs that approach the core competency of the company. So rather than janitors, should people doing grunt training classification be in house or not? Cases can be made either way, I guess. The outsourcing company probably can’t specialize in that, and they are just providing bodies at that point.

There are some weird rules about benefits that companies can only offer if they offer to all employees. So one tech company that doesn’t employ lots of its own warehouse staff (I’ll let you guess) can’t offer as good as health insurance as one that doesn’t.

It's not arbitrary.

It's the difference between the players, and the guys they hire to clean the windows at the arena.

I think they should err towards hiring for anything that is ongoing, and I also think they should have 'Minimum Requirements' for vendors including oversight.

That they don't is 'very bad'.

What's odd about G is that they are not only rich and can afford it ... they also try to be a moral arbiter, claim they are helping the world, which is really quite duplicitous.

Guess what: Car Companies have a large labour force, and they tend to get paid very well with Gold Plated Health care for example. Car companies are generally not trying to signal that they are 'better than other companies' etc..

The presentations at last Google conference with the bit about the Android photo scanner / reader used by the poor illiterate lady in Hyderabad, it was just over the top.

Seriously, pay your contractors properly before you tell us about how you're occasionally helping poor women in poverty.

Blame the bean counters. What I see in FAANG today is that departments fill as many FTE roles as they can until they hit their headcount limit, and then they employ a bunch of contractors on top of that as they feel are needed on top of the approved head count.

This is allegedly why the NSA was employing Edward Snowden as a contractor.

I think that's unlikely. I visited the CIA for a network equipment manufacturer in the late 90's and they had converted a significant portion of their IT employees to contractors. It's outsourcing to benefit the outsource contract companies. People were pretty bitter about it too. The military has got a ton of this sort of thing going on as well.

With regard to its popularity with publicly traded companies, aside from the cost and liability issues that are being discussed here, I have been told that Revenue per Employee is an investment metric that senior management try to optimise by the use of vendor and agency staff.

Source: I have worked for large corporates both as a contractor and as a full time employee in mixed teams.

> My question is, if it's so advantageous to employ people via onsite staffing firms (basically half of FAANG's workforce is employed this way), why doesn't Google stop directly employing people altogether?

Because it’s the mix that is advantageous, not either one (employees only vs contractors only).

Is there any data or studies to back that up though?

My guess is, like most of the norms and practices of corporate America, the answer is "We do things that way because other companies do things that way."

Kind of like the hilarious herd-like back-and-forth of these corporate back to office policies.

CEO: "Apple's going back to the office in September? Ok we should too! Send out the press release Karen!"

Karen: "Sir, Apple just pushed back to January."

CEO: "Then we should too! Send out a new press release, STAT!"

The cost of labour is a liability. The cost of a contractor is an operating expense. The cost of employees show up on a different line in the balance sheet than the cost of contractors do. If your life consists of fudging numbers in an Excel page and projecting a PowerPoint deck to a room full of rich white men in bespoke suits as they munch on a company-catered lunch, this is an important distinction.

In France, contractors cannot work in the same way than the regular employees. They have to be hired for a well-defined mission (on-site or on the staffing firm site) and take orders from their hierarchy, not from people of the customer company (otherwise it's called "délit de marchandage"). It has been abused a lot (to get staff that can be fired quickly and legally).

It is not only public companies, and the reasons are too numerous to list

A more recent trend it so they can claim to offer good benefits but in reality that is only for the select few actual employee's

Take for example the one company the claims to have a minimum wage of 70K (or what ever it was), I bet they are not paying the janitor, or other positions like that wage no they contracted those jobs out so now they can make the PR announcement they have this extremely high Min wage

the engineers etc i’ve worked with that were contractors were far worse and way below normal google hiring bar. sorry if that’s not PC but it’s the truth. if they could get hired at actual google they would’ve done it.

hell, if they could get hired as a SWE at a comparable firm they would do that instead of taking a massive pay cut to be a contractor

I interviewed with the self driving car team while it was still part of google X. I was told that every single employee on the team started out as a contractor, people would be converted to full time on a first come first serve basis, usually about a year and a half in. There was no path to jumping straight to FTE according to the hiring manager.

That's ironic then, because a huge percentage of the full-time employees at FAANG are actually former contractors who've been converted. So that would suggest a large chunk of their full-time employees are sub-par.

And that still doesn't answer the question--why hire anybody directly at all?

If you're so much better than the other contractors, they could just pay you higher rates. It'd be the same thing.

"huge percentage".. got any numbers to back that up? i can tell you its a single digit percent at G.

I've been on high performing teams at MSFT where it was over 70%.

You basically get to pick and choose who to hire after a year of seeing their code. Bonus if you pay contractors really high rates to attract good talent.

It depends heavily on the role. For SWE and SRE you're probably correct, but for a number of UX engineering roles, temp-to-hire is weirdly common.

I am familiar with this process at most of the companies in question. No, it is not a huge percentage; to the contrary, it's very difficult for contractors to become full-time employees.

That begs the question: why is Google using subpar developers? It's hard to imagine there just not being any better ones, and it probably isn't a money issue. Are they so against having good old employees?

Contractor SWE's at Google are very rare. In my several years there as both a SWE and EM (I'm no longer at Google), I never encountered one. My understanding from other EM's/Directors was they were only hired for non core product work, which did not overlap with the work that Google FTE SWE's did, and was very routine work. Most likely without internal code access - it was that separate.

Core product/infra work, and anything non-trivial, is always done by FTE's.

Opinions are my own. I also make no claim on the expertise of contractors.

The common saying in engineering is you use the right tools for the job. Likewise, you place the right people to the right job. It would be a mismatch to put an L5+ to do some low impact work. That would be an inefficient use of limited resources. The SWE would also be unhappy since that affects their perf/promo. Depends on the potential impact/difficulty/urgency, it might be more appropriate to save that work for an intern, fixterm, or TVC.

It's not about "so against having good old employees". It's business.

Just speculating (I work at a FAANG) – a lot of "software engineering" at these big tech companies is just centering divs and refactoring code – you don't need a 10xer to do that stuff.

sometimes you just need someone who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data or do grunt work that none of the devs want to do. And sometimes this need is just temporary for 4 months etc.

I wouldn't waste a google dev's on grunt work that any coder could do.

It's funny how arrogant you seem to have gotten working at Google. Looking through your post history a couple of years ago you were doing grunt work you would see as below you now. The belief that all Google employees are doing hard innovative work is untrue. A large portion are centering divs and wrangling JSON.

Hey now...this is Google we're talking about.

They're wrangle protobufs.

this account has had multiple owners.. i’ve never done grunt work

Why?

> who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data

If you can figure how to make that process "super simple" you can make staff engineer. Source: am L5 SWE at Google spending most of time wrangling unclean data

> A whistleblower represented by Whistleblower Aid has filed a complaint about the alleged violations with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nice.

Hopefully they're getting paid [1] for their efforts!

[1] https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower

"The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected."

From this post:

"While international labor law is not under the purview of the SEC, the complaint alleges that Google’s failure to disclose the pay parity liabilities, which it estimates could amount to $100m, constitute material misstatements in its quarterly financial reports, a violation of US securities law."

“The disclosure makes it clear that Google hasn’t just broken labor laws around the world, but has misled investors about major legal and financial liabilities,” said John Tye, founder and chief disclosure officer of Whistleblower Aid. “The lawful, anonymous whistleblower disclosure is a critical step toward ensuring that Google is held to account. We urge the SEC to bring an enforcement action against Google, and protect the rights of investors to receive complete and accurate information.”

It’s pretty messed up that “defrauding investors” is the legal action most likely to succeed in court and not, ya know, defrauding the people they actually defrauded.

That's a jurisdiction issue though. Of course, the underlying cause is that the US, unlike other countries, doesn't have a pay parity law for US-employed temps.

You know, it's funny, while reading this thread I've been trying to remember if we have any such laws in my country. Then I realized that it probably doesn't matter, because we have a law prohibiting employing temps unless it's absolutely critical, i.e. you must offer full time employment.

Yep, seems to be a lot of that [1] going around.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28484294

> whistleblower represented by Whistleblower Aid

> https://whistlebloweraid.org/#

Wish I had known about this when I worked at a catering company that hires "contractors" but then tells you what hours you can work, and when you can leave for the night. Sounds like a great company and I'll have to reach out and see if my info might be useful after all.

Ah, the “everything is securities fraud” school of US legal thought.

I was just thinking “wow I just read everything is securities fraud on HN”

It seems like a natural consequence of the financialization of US society; even crime is mostly viewed in terms of harms to shareholders.

I think I’m mostly being glib, mostly.

Matt Levine strikes again - Everything Is Securities Fraud!

This is not the first time Google has been known to do this. Eric Schmidt was personally involved in the criminal conspiracy that formed one of the other high profile cases, and enjoyed a long and prosperous career at Google for many years afterward.

Google is not an ethical employer.

An important thing to note is that for the executives in question, this is a compliance and PR issue, NOT an ethical issue!

These laws don't exist in the USA and from the perspective of the executives (and the wider American public) there's nothing wrong with paying permanent and temporary staff different wages. The actual monetary amounts are also pretty small (up to 100 million liability) which Google can easily afford, they just really didn't want to have to try and figure out department budget adjustments.

> These laws don't exist in the USA

One would think that they would have lawyers to figure that out and they probably have, otherwise they would be sinking in lawsuits from they own European employees.

> NOT an ethical issue!

They spend at least two years intentionally underpaying people. Of course you can reclassify everything as a PR issue, for example poison in baby food is a PR issue, hiding the fact that a bad ignition switch was a cost saving measure was a PR issue, fucking Auschwitz was a PR issue.

This is absolutely an ethical issue (yes I’m American). Google knowingly violated labor laws to underpay workers. Hopefully the PR from this causes Google to lose billions (and for ethical people to stop working/applying at Google, which honestly probably happened about 10 years ago).

Never forget: if slavery weren't illegal there would be no shortage of slave owners.

There are no shortage of slave owners today. Just not so much in western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maps_Global_Slavery_Index...

It continues to impress me that Google says it hires smart people, trains them not to put incriminating evidence in emails (really), and then hires managers who then put an entire chain into email (probably also archived as a group) and get the company written up on the front page of the NY Times (the very criteria they try to scare you with).

Just remember, for every screwup like this there's 100x more nefarious deeds that were properly kept secret.

I'm curious about what happened to the employees who complained about the dark patterns to prevent disabling location tracking. Clearly management knew this dysfunction was all by design and was smart enough not to write it down. If you're too user focused do you get sidelined and pushed out?

Perhaps those people are prioritizing making sure they personally have done the right thing (or more cynically, are covering their own asses) over shielding Google.

Rather odd as in the UK id expect to get paid a lot more as a contractor for the same roll as a FTE.

A bit of "schadenfreude " that clerical jobs in HR are some of the one in the UK

Update

Having said that I was underpaid as full timer when I worked for a BT subsidiary back in the day and the HR director was a "piece of work"

> expect to get paid a lot more as a contractor for the same roll as a FTE

In general, there are no FTE positions at the big-name companies themselves for Mechanical Turk-like gigs like these: high-turnover and churn is expected because the work is so monotonous. It’s all contracted-out to “body-shops” (like TEKSystems, etc) who have a roster of their own FTEs who are then seconded to the host company (Google, Microsoft, etc). They then get rotated out based on the company’s time limit (Microsoft’s was 18 months, I think?) assuming they don’t burn-out or quit before then.

This is also where Facebook and YouTube get their content moderators from.

> Rather odd as in the UK id expect to get paid a lot more as a contractor for the same roll as a FTE

As a software dev/management contractor, sure, but as a “self-employed Yodel delivery driver” or similar low skill role? (Which it seems to be in this case)

In the UK it’s fairly common for SWEs to also work on a contractor basis (but they own their own personal company which contracts directly with the contracting company’s HR dept: no bodyshops or consulting firms are involved in this particular style of employment). This happens a lot because of how the UK’s tax-law is set-up (by accident, not by-design, though).

———————-

Outside of the games industry, the UK’s been less-and-less of an attractive location to be as an SWE, which I personally attribute to the UK’s corporate culture which places engineering as strictly subordinate to management instead of embracing engineering-led management, which (in my opinion) is tied to the entrenched class-system (e.g. upper-management read classics at Oxbridge, why on earth would they allow a MEng from an industrial redbrick like UMIST or B’ham into the board-room for even a briefing, let alone help making decisions for the company? /s)

I’d concur with your assessment of British management culture and the class reasons for why it occurs. Ironically this kind of thing is also the reason why the U.K. has never produced a peer to any of the FAANGs

I think if you reify CP Snows thesis through the lens of the class system it turns out to be mostly correct.

> this kind of thing is also the reason why the U.K. has never produced a peer to any of the FAANGs

Well, ARM for one - but despite its incredible importance in the world, ARM isn't all that valuable because of their business-model. I was hoping that SoftBank and NVIDIA's purchase would make ARM more assertive in the marketplace and create value for themselves. I'm cautiously optimistic about their future though (as for the NVIDIA deal, why couldn't the UK let the deal go through but force NVIDIA to give the UK gov a non-expiring call-options to buy 51% of the company at the market-price but only in the interests of national-security or strategic-interest? That sounds reasonable.

In decades of the past I do think about what originally innovative companies like Sinclair, Amstrad, and others could have done to stay relevant for longer (which is difficult... their area in computers was entirely commoditized by the late-1990s)...

> Well, ARM for one - but despite its incredible importance in the world, ARM isn't all that valuable because of their business-model.

ARM I think fits an attempt to grow while operating within the constraints of the model that you mention above.

I was thinking of Madge Networks - once mentioned in the same breath as a small networking company called Cisco. Of course Madge went with ATM rather than Ethernet, but they also had blue-blooded management and would only hire engineers from Oxbridge (which is naturally going to limit both the outlook of your company and how fast you can grow).

That's a scourge all over Europe. Management are leaders and engineers are low level workers.

Follow hierarchy, don't stick your head out, get paid peanuts, leave for America at the first opportunity.

Norwegian here. The "management are leaders" thing is mostly real, but in tech it's not uncommon to have engineers as leaders, if you can convince any to take the job.

The second paragraph is not accurate for Norway at all. We're informal, get decent pay (not to mention have vastly better rights by law, like 5 weeks mandatory vacation a year) and definitely don't want to go to the US.

"Don't stick your head out" (Law of Jante) is a cornerstone of Norwegian/Scandinavian culture overall, not just in the corporate world.

Not for the UK examples which where like for like jobs not the fake self employed "gig" workers

Sounds like they were caught red handed, mens rea and all. Any chance this ends up with serious repercussions like prison time?

> any chance this ends up with serious repercussions like prison time

When has any staff member of a FAANG company faced prison time for a similar crime? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious though my instinct is to say 'never'.

The only one I can think of was Anthony Levandowski for stealing Waymo's trade secrets but he was pardoned a few months later.

That's not really a similar crime; that's a crime against another corporation.

Even still, the guy got a pardon after 33 federal charges and pleading guilty to one of them. The average person would never get even a hint of a chance at that (or, frankly, such a tiny sentence -- 18 months, 6 served before pardon).

Rich white dudes have a lot of empathy for other rich white dudes.

Not similar, but https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv... I am not really sure if he was arrested yet, or ever.

Executives only go to jail if

1. They do something to harm the government (i.e Tax evasion)

2. They do something to harm a Rich person

3. They do something to harm another multinational corporation

If they just harm a few citizens... the government literally does not care

Laws written by the powerful to serve the powerful. That's American plutocratic Justice for yah. Designed intentionally, just like this Google system of contracted companies.

The only time this happens is when the employee was harming the company in any way (insider trading, selling IP etc). It's pretty obvious who the law favors in these situations.

I was going to say that Italy convincted David Drummond in absentia but it turns out the sentence was suspended so he wouldn't actually have to go to jail.

Years back Google and Apple conspired to illegally fix wages and were caught no less red handed, including executives emailing to keep the program out of email because it's illegal. The conspiracy even used threats of ruining other competitors with patent claims to force them to participate.

The fines and judgement they paid were but a tiny fraction of the cumulative wages they stole. The lesson was that wage theft is profitable.

Until we start imposing a corporate death penalty in situations like this there will be no reason for companies to not simply do the economic calculation and decide the defrauding their employees is the right thing to do for their bottom line, one that can be optimized by lowering the risk of prosecution by better obscuring the crime or building up a legal team that can tie up the largest of nation states in court for decades.

> Civil law vs. criminal law: Punishment

> Another important distinction between civil and criminal law is the type of penalty paid for being found guilty. In a criminal case, if the individual charged with a crime loses the case, they’re likely facing incarceration or some type of probation. For civil cases, the resolution to a case doesn’t result in the “losing” party going to jail. Often the judgement results in a financial penalty or an order to change behavior.

https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/civil...

> Section 2 makes it an offence to commit fraud by false representation in any form. For a representation to be false, the representation being made must be wrong or misleading, and the person making it must know that it is, or might be, wrong or misleading.[0]

I think it is reasonable to presume that by paying it's contractors, Google and by virtue it's executive team was representing to said contractor that they were being paid according to the labor laws. Google executives knew that this was not the case, and withheld that information, likely in order to increase their own personal bonuses. That would seem to me to be theft by deception, illegal in every nation on earth as far as I can tell.

That's not even to mention the shareholders, who were defrauded as the company financials do not accurately reflect their labor liabilities. This in turn may have increased the value of Google stock, that then the people committing fraud around wages receive as a considerable portion of their compensation.

If knowingly lying for personal gain and costing potentially tens of thousands of people life changing amounts of money isn't fraud, what is?

[0]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-fraud-act-200...

Well, everything is securities fraud, so why not?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everyt...

>costing potentially tens of thousands of people life changing amounts of money

Have any numbers on this implication? How much is life changing in your opinion? Is there evidence this many people were shorted near that amount?

It's hard to imagine that local wages are life changing for those "potentially tens of thousands of people" but paying market clearing wages would be significantly different.

If the amounts of money involved or the number of parties is small, why commit the fraud?

That doesn't address your claim. Do you have evidence for what you wrote?

The feds shouldn't do anything until bonuses are handed out to the board of directors then snag them all away. Options, stocks, hard cash, a new car? Yoink!

I’m betting they legally underpaid a fair share of workers too.

Corporate corruption like this is one of the reasons we can’t have nice things.

The presence of an underclass of low-pay contractors depresses wages for everyone.

This is as good a time as any to remind workers that wage theft is among the biggest white collar crimes: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Actually curious.

Are these folks even paid by google? Or does google pay some contractor who then pays folks?

Are the laws designed to cover temporary staff hired by google, or temporary staff hired by a contractor hired by google?

Google pays work agencies (like Adecco) that then pay workers. The worker has a temporary employment contract with the agency, but reports directly to Google staff.

The laws are meant to cover temporary staff hired by a work agency hired by google.

Atleast the European countries have laws that require equal pay for full-time vs contractors. Its about time the US instituted such laws too. It's just gross how companies get away with using contractors for the same job as full-timers but treat them like lepers that don't deserve equal pay or benefits.

Most of these laws were written in Europe when staff leasing from external agencies was legalized at the end of '90/early '00. They were meant to avoid what you describe. I don't know if they work well, but it's better than nothing.

I'm Norwegian and things are probably different down in mainland Europe, but at least here we have fairly little use of external agencies and temps. You're required by law to offer full time employment unless specific criteria are met. External agencies are usually used for cleaning, cantinas and things like that, but not much else. The (much, much) stricter labor laws grant the same rights to everyone regardless of employer, position and percentage, so there's not much to save from using external agencies anyway.

One exception is concultancy agencies, but they are usually much more expensive (and offer better salaries), so that's mostly to avoid dealing with the recruiting aspect and risking bad hires.

Temporary positions is a problem for nurses, in kindergartens and, perhaps ironically, for professors.

Wait till people realize that businesses legally underpay tens of millions of workers.

Again?

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-lawsuit-excl...

Time for a class action against Google. The whole industry could have depressed wages from their actions.

Today in "class action over the whole industry having depresed wages from their actions" history, this month marks the 21st anniversary of the DoJ filing a complaint against Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe for agreeing not to poach each other's employees. The companies eventually settled a civil class action suit for $415 million.

Do you mean 11th anniversary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Yes! Don't know how I added the extra 10 there.

It wasn't enough to correct their malevolent behavior. Alphabet's assets should be frozen pending a full investigation.

Uhh? You want to basically kill the company pending investigation?

Who does that help?

They previously stole wages from every dev, and looks like they did it again. RICO on past and ongoing criminal acts.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/14/google_android_data_a...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracki...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2517832/google-hit-wit...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/02/apple-s...

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-pay-discrimination-lawsuit-...

https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-find-gmail-privacy-sett...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/google-sued-for-se...

I'm with you that it's time for a class-action. But when I say class action I don't mean a law suit, I mean the labor class joining in action against the owning class. Collective bargaining, collective action.

ah, surely just incompetence or a bureaucratic black hole and not malice.

whelp

I find it odd that Google is so proud of the fact that it plans on recycling all its power and is spending so much on being carbon neutral, but can't have the common decency to pay people for the work they did. They have a misplaced sense of morality.

The being carbon neutral thing is way cheaper than paying people and produces nice PR. Same for diversity stuff. Companies jump on that because it's cheap.

jesus the lack of enforcement on stuff like this is outrageous. at the very least the company should be fined the garnished wages + some, the executives involved fired with no severance, and an external organization should do a compliance review

I thought garnishing wages was the problem in the first place...

Evil has really crept in.

Contracting firms fulfill all the same functions as union halls.

Tech workers should just unionize. Keep more of the cheddar for themselves.

DO NO EVIL

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