> On March 3, 2023, the Regional Director issued a Decision and Direction of Election in which he found Respondent Cognizant and Respondent Google to be joint employers of the petitioned-for employees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.