The union will win this one and hopefully it goes to court b/c this whole contractor scam needs to be abolished.
I don't have to do corporate training. I don't have to use a corporate laptop with corporate spyware; I use my own laptop. I work on side projects that are none of the company's business. I don't get told how I should work; I get evaluated based on results. Numerous employee policies simply don't apply to me. I work, and I submit invoices, and I get paid for the hours I work.
This may well not be the policy at every company. There are certainly cases where companies use contractors where they should be using employees, and for that matter vice versa. There are cases where companies treat their contractors badly, and for that matter treat their employees badly. There are also cases where contractors are a better choice (e.g. variable/uncertain needs over time, employees of third-party companies that don't want to be employees of the company in question, contractors who prefer being contractors).
Some people prefer to work as contractors. Some people prefer to work as employees. I very much wish that everyone has the option to work in the model they prefer.
You are the one arguing there is no such thing as a true contractor, one that is not "effectively an employee".
The scottsman has just walked up and introduced himself to you.
Regardless, I'm still not seeing the rationale for why employees of a contracting corporation are supposed to be negotiating directly with customers. My sister worked at Accenture. If she wanted a raised why would she try and negotiate with who her customer she was working with at the time, given that her bosses at Accenture are the ones that set her salary?
This is distinct from what the previous comment was about: the practice of using contractors for the same functions as full time employees. That's a totally separate thing than unions. Companies can get in trouble for using contractors for the same jobs as employees even if there's no union involved.
From the decision (linked 2 up)
At all material times, Respondents Cognizant and Google have codetermined the essential terms and conditions of employment of employees employed at the E. Parmer Lane facility and have been joint employers.
(2nd to last paragraph of "Findings of Fact > Jurisdiction")
The original article (the register) quotes a union member
Google and Cognizant have proceeded to make unilateral changes to our working conditions such as a forced return to office, removal of sick pay during a global pandemic, and the implementation of a 'Clean Room' policy that bars us from having our phones, paper, or pens in our office, without bargaining with our union.
The line of reasoning seems to be something like:
- There are decisions that Google is making that, if the workers were employees, would need to be negotiated with the union.
- Google is making those decisions with application to the contractors as well as their direct employees
- Consequently, for the purposes of union negotiation, Google is a joint employer (alongside Cognizant) of the contractors because it is making decisions that affect the workers and ought to be negotiated with a union.
If that is the argument, it seems fair to me.
If Google wants to make decisions about the employment conditions of contractors then it needs to accept that it is an "employer" of those workers. Alternatively it can decide not to make decisions about their conditions and leave all of that to Cognizant - but in that case it cannot enforce those policies on the workers until after Cognizant has negotiated with the union and reached an agreement about the the workers conditions. Google would have to make sure that every workplace policy that they wished to have applied to the contractors was handled as a contractual arrangement between Google and Cognizant, not an employment arrangement.
Previously, this only came into effect if companies were using contractors for the same functions as full time employees. And the outcomes in those cases was often to make the company hire on the contractors full time, not dragging a company's customers into it labor disputes. Plenty of people have been alleging this, but none have substantiated allegations that Google is using contractors for the same work as employees.
You could argue that they need to bargain with Cognizant, and Cognizant in turns needs to bargain with Google, but the NLRB has (rightfully) determined that it's ultimately Google setting the working conditions, and therefore the union should be bargaining directly with Google.
If their employer would like to offer them changes in working conditions or pay that, in order to be feasible or economical, they would need to change the terms of their Google contract, they can't do that without Google's involvement. It would seem far more efficient to have Google be in the room involved in the negotiations and bound by the arbitration, rather than have the contracting company have to go to Google and suggest something they might like to change, get tacit approval that that might be up for renegotiation, then go to their employees and make an offer based on that assumption, and if the employees accept it, hope that Google honors the tacit agreement they got rather than laughing and telling them how they now have them over a barrel and further tightening their contract.
I don't think that particular kind of "separation" is conclusive, just suggestive. Imagine that Acme corporation direct-hires a few hundred workers and then splits them into two groups, with different badges and offices and branding and e-mails.
While clear differences would exist, they wouldn't be the right kind of difference that could alter their legal classification as Acme employees.
Right now you're not giving any details or other way to confirm your claims besides "I work at Google, trust me bro." There are plenty of people who work at Google that say the opposite, that contractors aren't doing the same work as full time employees.
> What teams are using contract work for the same functions as fill time work?
Are you asking for the organizations, teams, projects, managers to be named? Depending on what you need, that's a lot of exposure and I'm not sure that'll assuage your concerns its "trust me bro". I have seen it in the ******** and ****** organizations.
> What specific work items are being done by both full time and contractors?
Software engineering and design. They're embedded in the teams, there was never a single difference between my TVC/non-TVC ex-coworkers other than their security badge color. They were not brought on for temporary or time-bounded projects.
Before you follow up: I appreciate your skepticism, but it's unclear if it's earnest or a lure. I don't have any legal protection from a trillion dollar company so I can't write a gossip-y essay naming names and giving you case studies, but I'm happy to answer any questions short of that. Like I said yesterday, it's very unclear what specifically what change your mind here
-- especially now that you're claiming "plenty [of Googlers] say it isn't true". There isn't a single comment on this entire article, and it tremendously beggars belief that any Googler would tell you it wasn't true. If I worked at McDonald's, its like a stranger yelling at me that I'm lying because other McDonald's employees said no one has to wear a nametag.
Please consider the emotions you implicitly communicate, it's quite frightening interacting with you given how aggressively you're communicating.
> Google does not directly employ the workers who collect or create the data required for much of its technology, be they the drivers who capture photos for Google Maps’ Street View, the content moderators training YouTube’s filters to catch prohibited material, or the scanners flipping pages to upload the contents of libraries into Google Books.
> Having these two tiers of workers – highly paid full-time Googlers and often low-wage and precarious workers contracted through staffing firms – is “corrosive”, “highly problematic”, and “permissive of exploitation”, the employees said.
While some may be disgusted with the segregation between the two "tiers" of FTEs doing software development and contractors doing manual labor, the fact that the workforce is starkly separated into two different tiers goes to show just how separate these two segments of the workforce really are. Most of the coverage of Google's contracting emphasizes these points: how separate and unequal the contract and full-time workers are.
Now there's an anonymous internet commenter claiming to work at Google insisting that this is not the case - but unwilling to actually specify what team or organization is actually using contract workers for the same functions at FTEs. Is it really "frightening" and "aggressive" that I don't find these anonymous, non-specific allegations more compelling than the writings by people with their real names attached to their claims?
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-c...
Yet you can't list even one specific example. If you really are seeing this happen, go contact the NLRB or the media and get your observations out there and into the public discussion. If all you're willing to say is "trust me, it happens, but I can't even list any one example of this happening" is it really surprising that you're being met with skepticism?
I did name em btw. Count the asterix. Also its literally every single team. Every single team has TVCs. There's a smol iOS app (think Arts and Culture, but not) I almost took the lead role for that would have had all the contributors be TVCs and I did code review.
This isn't actually naming anything, you're just insisting it's happening everywhere without actually making a specific allegation.
An example of this would be, "full-time employees were being tasked with running performance regression tests for the Google Drive backend, and in 2019 this started to be done by both FTEs and contractors".
A pattern that really engenders skepticism is when people insist that something is incredibly pervasive and common, yet fail to list even one example of it happening. If contract workers are being used to do the same work as FTEs on all teams, you should have a wealth of examples of "X team used FTEs to do Y, and starting at such and such a time they started using contractors to do Y as well".
The recap, NRLB filing linked in this article is not alleging that Cognizant employees are doing the same work as FTEs at google. It's alleging that by having contractors return to the office, and setting other policies like sick leave Google is now a joint employer. The idea that Google is using FTEs and contractors to fulfill the same functions is not supported by the NRLB finding. It's not even a topic that the NRLB is discussing in this document. The NRLB is trying to claim that setting RTO and PTO policies makes Google a joint employer, despite contractors doing separate work from FTEs.
If you're only willing to say "it happens but I can't give any further details or examples" then just say so and be willing to accept that this doesn't meet many people's epistemic thresholds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...
In many places in the world you're only an independent contractor if you don't work long term for 1 single client and only if they don't dictate all your working conditions.
Because that would be the description of an employee and the condition is called "hidden employment" and it's illegal in many jurisdictions.
At the cost of complexity, you get freedom.
Is it really news to you? There's also another reason - companies trying to duck various taxes tied to employment.
> At the cost of complexity
There are many more costs than that, including loss of a lot of negotiating leverage, job security, and opportunity for advancement.
I used to be a contractor for the US government, and worked alongside civilian government employees. They tried to even hire me away from my employer (the contractor), and I refused: there just wasn't a good reason. The problem with being a government employee is that the pay is terrible, and also the retirement system is only good if you're a life-long government employee (there's no 401k). If you just want to stay in that job for the rest of your career, it's a great deal, though the pay isn't great, because the job security is fantastic and the retirement benefits are solid if you put in all those years (basically you get a good portion of your last salary until you die). But the cost is that your current pay is lousy: as a software dev, I made much more money than my coworkers, plus I got to save some in an employer-matched 401k account.
The government can't find that many people who want the safe, low-pay employment option they offer, particularly for software/IT jobs, so they turn to contractors to provide those people and offer them a type of employment (high-pay, not-so-safe) that the government simply can't do on its own.
It's the same with many big companies: hiring and firing is difficult and expensive for them, so they turn to 3rd-party contracting firms. It costs them: each contractor costs quite a bit more than a regular employee, but they don't have to deal with the other problems that come with regular employees. There's drawbacks, however; contractors aren't in it for the long term, so if you find a contractor you really like, you try to get them to join the company directly.
But there are also reasons to be an employee, and to prevent corporations from pretending employment is contracting.
I saw the exact same thing (but from the employee side) when I worked at a huge tech company. Using contractors was a way of getting people in quickly (much faster than normal recruiting), and also being able to get rid of them quickly if they're bad workers: just don't renew their contract after 6 months. Good ones were hired as regular employees because it was cheaper long-term.
Many people work very hard, including unionizing, legal action, etc., to compel companies to treat them as employees.
surely the contracting company gets to pay that tax, rather than the client.
I expect a basic rule like "Hire an accountant if you don't want to figure out all this stuff." to be contracting 101.
You can do all those things as a normal employee (perhaps a company lied to you that they couldn't?). Companies offer contractors higher pay and/or better benefits because they want to shirk their legal obligations to employees, there's nothing that would actually prevent them from offering those better terms to employees.
In places where it's implemented it's not JUST about having 1 customer. It's having 1 customer:
- for a long time (years and years)
- having basically the same restrictions as regular employees (same working hours, can't set your own; same work location, their office, can't set your own; usually the exact same IP restrictions as employees, etc)
At that point, you're basically an employee without any legal protections. In places where employees actually have legal protections.