The reason for the separate treatment of TVCs and full time employees is likely due to the Microsoft independent contractor lawsuits a long time ago.

Microsoft used to treat independent contractors similarly to full time employees, except for a few benefits such as participation in their stock benefits. When the IRS ruled that the independent contractors were really employees due to them being treated similarly as full time employees, independent contractors sued Microsoft to get stock benefits as well.

See https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...

Isn't that really just the inverse of a union, which facilitates collusion between the sellers of labor (employees) to raise the price (wages)?

What if I disagree with the union's position on ethics? For example, I do not agree with Google's decision to avoid some DoD contracts (I worked in Google at the time). I'd only want a union to handle my work aspects (and even then... it's not clear they would provide me with all the wonderful things I have received over the years from Google and other tech employers).

> Plenty of software unions fighting for the ethical interests of the employees

My country has strong unions (industry wide), yet any employee or group of employees who would engage in that sort of activism, unrelated to bettering work conditions or compensation negotiation, for instance trying to dictate their boss who they should or shouldn't do business with purely for political reasons or affiliations, would be deemed insubordinate and would be fired, lawfully.

The underpayment was a top priority of google, to the point that individual executives committed crimes that should have led to their incarceration - had the DoJ interpreted the law according to its text rather than according to their political ideology.

As it stands, all the DoJ was capable of was issuing guidance that acknowledged that crimes were committed that should have led to jail time, and politely asks corporate executives to not commit those crimes again, on pain of another chiding letter.

I always thought most Google employees would be creating less value than what they earn, with a few of Google's money printer products enabling such high remuneration for everybody.

> trillion dollar company with some/many employees delivering quite a bit more value than they are paid

Companies structurally and intentionally pay the average employee less than that employee generates in value. (If they paid more on average, they'd obviously either decide to never start or would go bankrupt. If they paid people working equal to their contributions on average, they'd show no profit and would have no reserves to cover for employees who are out on paid leaves that society or the employees want companies to cover the costs of.)

The underpayment relative to value delivered is a necessary condition (at least in my opinion, by simple math above). If you want to capture all the net value you create, you should work for yourself. For many (including me), I'd rather trade away some of the upside in exchange for a much lower stress existence.

But it does point out that this is not a union that will improve worker's condition like a regular union.

The Google union aims to stop Google to work on certain projects.

Many don't agree with unions. What should those people do? Make another union?

If people don't want to work on DoD contract, they can transfer to other teams. There are like 1000 teams in Google. Internal transfer is not hard.

For some people, holding others down is the fun of it all.

I hope your comment goes to the top. It highlights the real reason for hating these large corporations. Ignorance.

You know what really traumatizes kids for life? "compassionate" policies that encourage parents to sell their kids to the cartels who then sell them to people to use as shields to get across the boarder. When DHS does bother to paternity test "families" coming across the boarder some horrendous percentage of the kids were not related to the "parents".

You want to not traumatize kids? Have proper boarder control and don't tell people if they manage to sprint across the boarder they will get a bunch of free stuff.