
Googlers Write to CEO Demanding Equal Treatment for Contractors - tareqak
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-05/googlers-write-to-ceo-demanding-equal-treatment-for-contractors
======
protomyth
Ask Microsoft how it works out for a company when contractors are treated as
employees[1]. What ticks me off is that before that lawsuit, I was really
enjoying being a contractor then that happened and companies became really
skittish and a bit hostile.

1) [https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-
findlaw-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-
treat-c-idUSTRE53063S20090401)

~~~
jasode
Microsoft losing that contractors case also had a lot of repercussions
affecting legitimate contractors.

In the early 1990s before Microsoft lost, I easily got direct-1099 contracting
jobs at various companies.

Afterwards, every company got scared and _overcorrected_ away from 1099s. It
didn't matter if you incorporated as "Joe's Programming Solutions Inc". They
insisted you had to go through one of their "approved vendors" which was
basically just a middleman company set up to hire you as a W-2 employee. That
intermediate company would then contract you to the 1099-averse client.
Microsoft's defeat was when all the "W-2 bodyshops" popped up.

Instead of me earning $100 directly from a client, I had to find a W-2 shop to
"hire" me as an employee and let them skim $30 from my hourly billing so I
would only net $70/hour. It wasn't too happy about that but that's the closest
I could get to being a freelancer. I really didn't want to be anyone's
employee.

I believe most contractors share my opinion that the overall effect of the
court judgement against Microsoft was a _net negative_ and it didn't improve
work conditions for contractors. Instead, it just made it worse by enriching
middlemen we never asked for. It's also a net negative for the client company
because they pay a somewhat higher bill rate to the W-2 company because they
provide the service of "legal cover" to protect against a Microsoft type of
lawsuit or IRS reclassification. It's a textbook version of economic
inefficiencies.

~~~
bsimpson
In exchange for the $30 an hour, you get a meaningless phone call from someone
who works there every couple months and access to a terrible health plan.

My plan was literally "pay $100 per month to avoid the 2% Obamacare tax." It
covered basically nothing, and the deductible was ridiculous.

The only value "talent agencies" add is that you can start earning money
immediately, instead of jumping through whatever hoops vendors need to jump
through to be approved nowadays.

~~~
protomyth
You got hooked up with someone bad, which is a shame. I had a great health
plan as a contractor (through my agency) and they were great about finding fun
jobs. I do know a lot of agents didn't tell folks what rate they were being
billed out at (I suspect that $30/hour would mean you are not getting good
value), but my pay was a % of the bill rate.

~~~
bsimpson
I actually negotiated my pay with the hiring manager. I have no idea what the
agency was paid.

I got the invitation directly from the large company I was consulting for.
They explained to me that they didn't work directly with freelancers; they had
processes in place to prevent TVCs from being retroactively deemed FTEs (and
compensated for withheld benefits). Therefore, they put me in touch with an
agency whose only function was to hire freelancers as W2 employees and rent
them back out to the company. I don't recall exactly: I think the agency's
only client was the firm I was consulting for. They might have had 1 or 2
more. The whole we-only-exist-because-bureaucracy was pretty transparent.

Funny story: one of the TVC restrictions was that you could only be one for a
year. (At the end of the year, you had to either convert to full-time or take
6 months off.) Partway through the year, my client decided they wanted to
switch agencies. Thousands of us got an email that basically said "As of next
week, you legally work for Other Agency. Your day-to-day work will be the
same."

~~~
protomyth
Uhm.... that sounds really, really shady. If you do the negotiating then
they've failed at 90% of their job, and I suspect you most certainly didn't
get your full value.

~~~
bsimpson
They chose an inaccurate job title for me to justify my salary. Maybe I could
have made more freelancing somewhere else, but I think I was at the top of
what this role was willing to pay.

I was making $100 per hour with a guaranteed 40 billable hours per week.

~~~
protomyth
Well, I'm glad you got something decent out of it. I have a bit of a visceral
reaction to bad actors in agencies since their actions had consequences.

It was very informative at one place I worked where a ticked off employee
released a spreadsheet with all of the hourly rates for all the consultants. I
was rather amused to lean how many bad actor agencies there were (although
gratified that I worked with the honest sort). It was a bit amazing to me that
people were baffled that I didn't really want to look at the spreadsheet. I
knew my rate, was pretty happy, and was a bit worried it would impact how I
viewed others.

------
jonlucc
I work in pharma, and I was a contractor before I was hired on. It's a similar
situation to what's described in the article, where contractors are full-time
employees of a third-party company, and that company's rules are the ones that
apply to their employees.

If I remember correctly, the contract company was mostly concerned with co-
employment. As it was explained to me, Microsoft had a similar setup, but
contractors were treated exactly the same as employees. Those contractors sued
and won all of the additional compensation they had been denied as
contractors.

For that reason, Google can't have too much control over things like hiring
and firing decisions, healthcare offerings, compensation, etc, lest they be
considered a co-employer. In the article, it sounds like the Google employees
want Google to wield its power to enforce particular HR policies on their
contractors, but I'm not entirely sure that's possible.

Disclaimer: I'm a biologist, not a lawyer.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
These "contractors" exist solely to create the ability to exclude employees
from benefits and rights. It's entirely possible for Google to resolve this:
Google can hire it's own employees. From my recollection, Apple Store
employees are, in fact, employees of Apple. Whereas if you go to any sort of
Google popup retail location, you're going to be working with contractors.

The other way Google can control all of these aspects even for contractors is
to refuse to work with contractors who do not uphold the standards they set.
As these contracting companies exist solely to provide contract work to big
tech cos, they will fall in line immediately.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> The other way Google can control all of these aspects even for contractors
> is to refuse to work with contractors who do not uphold the standards they
> set. As these contracting companies exist solely to provide contract work to
> big tech cos, they will fall in line immediately.

Hmm. But if they try to match (or come close) to Google's standards then
Google will likely have to pay more for a contractor than they do for an
employee. At that point might as well just hire them.

~~~
jonlucc
Even when I was a contractor, I never quite understood this. The contractor
costs Google whatever it costs the contractor to employ them _plus_ some
amount of profit for the contract company. It would be cheaper to just employ
people at a contractor's wage and internalize those processes, at least where
the contractors are doing similar work to their own employees. It might still
not make sense to start doing things like maintenance or cooking.

As best I can tell, it is a different pot of money. In my company, contractors
are a budgetary decision, while employees require HR and other hurdles.
Similarly, when you want to cut costs, you can fire contractors (shrink the
contract and let the contract company do whatever they need to) without making
the news with a headline like "Google lays off 10% of its workforce".

~~~
dragonwriter
> The contractor costs Google whatever it costs the contractor to employ them
> plus some amount of profit for the contract company.

Plus contracting overhead on both sides (the contractor-side overhead is
neither an employment cost for the contracting firm nor profit.)

------
sultanofswing
I have mixed feelings about this as someone who has worked as a contractor at
a FAANG company.

On the one hand, many of the complaints are absolutely correct. Where I worked
contractors were:

\- Second class citizens \- Often worked on teams with other engineers, and
ended up being in charge of a major part of the project \- Have subpar working
conditions but are still required to come to the office (ie crappy working
spaces with fewer amenities, often the inability to sit with their actual
team) \- In worst case scenarios can often end up with abusive manager who at
times will explicitly let them know their place as a contractor \- Get the
runaround when it comes to discussion 'conversion' to full time employment.
I've seen this happen only a handful of times

From what I've seen the ones most beholden to this crappyness are contractors
who are non US citizens (after all if you are a citizen what's stopping you
from applying to literally almost any other job... even at a large tech
company). Contractors from outside the US are pretty much stuck.

On the flipside the bar for contractors and full time employees is VASTLY
different. For contractors (at least in engineering) the interview process can
be mostly boiled down to about five recruiter style questions on your area of
expertise, or something as simple as "build a class that does XYZ, ok you're
great for this role". No full day onsite interview loops with multiple
whiteboard / architecture questions etc.

I'm not saying with proper preparation contractors couldn't do the same roles
and aren't qualified, but they are also held do a different standard (for
better or for mostly worst).

I've also seen many contractors leverage the name-brand of the company they
worked for to get interviews that may have been previously inaccessible (yes,
even with putting "contracting for X company" on your resume, Google / Apple
et all still stand out to recruiters).

------
throwaway1205
I hope this doesn't make things difficult for those of us who actually prefer
being contractors. Becoming a contractor in tech (not at Google) is one of the
best decisions I've ever made.

1\. I mostly get to choose how much I work, currently around 25 hours per
week.

2\. Despite fewer hours, I still make more annually than I ever did working
full-time.

3\. I don't have waste time going to all-hands meetings, mandatory trainings,
offsites, etc.

4\. I can work on my own side projects without worrying about an employer
trying to claim the IP.

Maybe you could argue there's less job security, but if you think you have
much of that with at-will employment, you're fooling yourself.

~~~
moeamaya
Agree in a very similar situation and hope to continue this format of working.

But that said this equality effort isn't about folks like us, it's about
helping out those that need healthcare, holiday pay, etc. I'm on the side of
those in need getting the benefits over our privileged lives being mildly
altered.

~~~
Consultant32452
It amuses me, because a significant percentage of these consultants are
foreign workers brought in for the explicit purpose of increasing supply and
suppressing domestic wages. Now the domestic workers are fighting to improve
the wages of the people brought there to hurt them.

I want to be clear I'm not intending to say anything negative about the
domestic or foreign workers. It's just an amusing situation imo.

------
jpollock
When I was a contractor (in NZ), there were substantial tax benefits.

Not only was my pay higher (to compensate for no-notice termination), I paid
less income tax because many expenses were deductible (car, power, house,
phone, computers, etc).

It turned out to be something like double my typical salary, with health
insurance taken care of by taxes.

Are the tax rules different in the US?

~~~
rhacker
Somewhat similar, but there are a lot of downsides. Doing taxes as a
contractor is basically like doing taxes as a business. Probably similar in
your situation. However the rules for it are much much more convoluted,
especially when you have healthcare insurance. In the US, the healthcare
insurance easily has a tax break involved as an employee, but as a contractor,
it would likely require crazy things like incorporating and setting up a
CEO/board, etc... Total nightmare. You might get lucky and cheat by calling it
an outside service (and expense), but technically you could get audited and
bad things result. Things get even more complicated if you have or want an HSA
as a contractor. This USED to be a good option, but now it seems like HSA
plans are total shit. HSAs used to be cheaper but now they seem to be the same
price as non-HSA plans so there really is no advantage to them. Basically,
until that side of the tax code is fixed, contractors are fucked over health
insurance wise in the US.

~~~
zaroth
There’s nothing convoluted about deducting health insurance and dental
premiums if you are self employed.

Money you pay for health and dental insurance is counted as a reduction
against your AGI — technically this is even better than a deduction, as long
as you don’t qualify for insurance through another employer, and cannot exceed
your total employment earnings. So you can’t decline employee sponsored health
insurance and also claim the reduction, and you can’t deduct premiums to the
point where you have a net loss.

Qualified expenses go on Line 29 of Form 1040 where it says “Self-employed
health insurance deduction”.

You do not have to incorporate or setup an LLC to claim the deduction.

------
sincerely
>When a shooting happened at YouTube’s campus in San Bruno, California, in
April, TVCs didn’t get some communications updating workers on the situation,
which left them feeling unsafe, the TVCs said.

Wow, that seems like something very hard to argue against. I hope that even if
Google keeps them as contractors they improve communications.

~~~
nostrademons
That sounds like an oversight. IIRC there are "googlers-<site>" mailing lists
that each full-time employee at a site is automatically added to. Whoever was
doing comms that day probably assumed it went to everyone in the building, not
realizing that it doesn't cover contractors or visiting employees.

------
callinyouin
YMMV, but where I work (non-tech company) contractors are treated quite well.
I think the general feeling from most of the company is that contractors are
hired to do specific project work, so their domain knowledge is narrow and
specialized and thus are better/more knowledgeable than the in-house
developers. This leads to people within the company going straight to
contractors for questions/discussions/planning/etc, leaving in-house devs out
of the loop. In the end you're left with over-engineered solutions and scope
creep among other dysfunctions. Really frustrating.

------
eaandkw
Careful what you wish for. You might just get it and it may not be what you
want.

~~~
babygoat
That's very ominous. Would you care to elaborate?

~~~
AlexandrB
I think he's implying that Google may resolve the issue by treating the full
time employees the same way they treat the contractors.

~~~
tanilama
I am quite welcome if that happens actually, that is what equality means isn't
it.

~~~
babygoat
Are you saying you want them all to endure "discrimination, racism, and sexual
harassment"? I hope I'm reading you wrong.

~~~
tanilama
Well, if Google is such a horrible place to work for, my advice will be quit
and sue them

~~~
babygoat
I'm not sure what your agenda is but I doubt anyone wants to take advice from
you.

~~~
tanilama
True, no one has to. Reality will figure itself out.

------
jiveturkey
> One contractor, who works 50 to 60 hours a week in Google’s marketing
> division, said TVCs are treated as “collateral damage” who can be hired and
> fired on short notice to help the company achieve business goals quickly and
> cheaply.

well yeah, that is the point of contractors ...

------
tareqak
I recently watched "Requiem for the American Dream" (the documentary is
included with Prime Video, and there is also a book of the same name) [0]. One
of the points that Noam Chomsky made near the end was about _undermining
solidarity_ (I don't remember the exact phrase, but it had solidarity its
name). I found the why in which Chomsky portrayed the accomplishments of
unions and how the political elite dealt with unions afterwards (e.g.
McCarthyism) both enlightening and depressing. Workers regardless of
profession were all united towards better conditions for all. The gradual
exaltation of selfishness and self-interest has become a silent but effective
tool in pitting people against each other.

I highly encourage others here to watch it should they have 72 minutes to
spare.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWD8Wksx_zI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWD8Wksx_zI)

------
throwawayhere1
Shouldn’t this lie on the consulting firms placing them? Equally, are the
consultants unaware that they work for the staffing firm doing project for
Google?

Yes, security communication should go to all. But everything else?

------
vadym909
The genie is out of the bottle. No company can afford to hire it's contractors
as fulltime. Their cost would double. There's 2 things that can happen 1\.
Move to automate or offshore these jobs 2\. Bring parity to fulltime or
contract employee pay and benefits so its indistinguishable whether you work
fulltime or contract- its just a choice for both. Just like do you want PPO or
HMS for healthcare.

------
sokoloff
Maybe I'm missing something, but why _should_ contractors have access to
company-wide emails to staff, townhall staff meetings, or Google health care
and benefits?

Some of those seem very much the _essence_ of the difference between working
for Google as an employee vs not working for Google as an employee.

------
gundmc
Isn't "Googlers Write..." misleading?

The letter linked in the article says it was written by TVCs (Temps, Vendors,
and Contractors).

I guess "Contractors Write to CEO Demanding Equal Treatment for Contractors"
is less exciting?

------
throw2016
It's great to see some Googlers stand up for this. Subcontracting is an all
around poor practice and encourages exploitation of labour, and whenever this
is pointed out the same old false arguments on the lines 'but some slaves had
it good' or the 'alternative is starvation' are trotted out, completely
defocusing the companies benefiting from this labour and their dependence for
it. This subtly shifts and derails discussion.

But the bigger problem having this discussion in a tech context is the tech
community is also made of up many who derive near religious identity from
their jobs and conflate their jobs with success and identity, and logical
arguments cannot appeal to emotion and this need for hierarchy.

------
izacus
This is literally illegal in many European countries which demand that people
working at FTE conditions be employed as full-time employees.

~~~
klodolph
Is this literally illegal? From what I understand, the typical arrangement is
that these people are full-time employees, but they are employees of a
different company, and the contract is between companies.

To delve into hypotheticals, company X has a building and hires company Y to
clean it. Company Y employs the janitors full time, and company Y decides the
policies for hiring and firing janitors, and decides what their schedules are.
The janitors are working at FTE conditions, and therefore they are full-time
employees, but they're not employees of company X and don't get the same
benefits.

~~~
edanm
Well obviously it depends on the country. I know that here (in Israel), the
are laws around this that say that anyone working in what is effectively FTE
in a company, even if they are contractors, had to be treated in various ways
like a fte of the company. Eg in vacation days.

I'm not sure about any subtleties here- when exactly this kicks in, etc. But
there are some real protections.

~~~
klodolph
To be clear, these people are FTE in a company, it's "just" a different
company. There are various laws here in the US about whether someone is an
employee and a contractor and the courts generally seem interested in
enforcing them such as they are.

The test here comes down to how much control the company has. If the company
controls schedules, pays ordinary wages, provides equipment and training, etc.
then it's an employee. If the person can set their own schedule, gets paid for
work completed, buys their own equipment, and is free to work for other
companies then it's likely a contractor.

I know that Google has an office in Tel Aviv so it should be easy enough to
check if they have the same kind of staffing they do elsewhere. The company I
work at mostly uses contractors and vendors for things like janitorial
service, catering, etc. At least, as far as I can tell, I'm more of a code
monkey.

------
baybal2
Why wouldn't Googlers make a union? I think Microsoft had one back in days,
but it was microscopic.

~~~
duxup
At least in the US, unions tend to cover jobs where there is a lot of manual
labor and etc. They tend to heavily emphasize seniority over most anything,
and in doing so straight up discourage merit based pay. Many have strict rules
about what position is offered to who and when (seniority wins again).

They're not very effective / desirable for higher skill jobs IMO where merit
and skills change rapidly.

Granted that's all very general and I'm sure there are exceptions but unions
(I hear they're different elsewhere) in the US are kinda wonky, not very
agile, and can become an negative entity in many ways as they serve their own
interests.

~~~
ForHackernews
This isn't strictly true. Professional athletes in major leagues are
unionized, and their jobs are highly specialized and well paid. The Writers
Guild of America is another union that represents a non-manual labor
profession. You could also consider the American Medical Association as a
pseudounion guild that restricts entry into the medical field and keeps wages
high.

~~~
duxup
Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a
different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at
their skill level. That's a pretty distant comparison. Same goes for doctors
where they're not readily replaceable considering training / licensing
requirements.

~~~
SilasX
>Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a
different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at
their skill level.

Er, what? That was the point.

You: Unions are mainly effective for low-skill, manual jobs.

ForHackernews: But they have them for professional athletes and actors too.

You: Irrelevant, they're a whole different animal.

Yes, the point all along was that the union model applies to different
animals/worker-types.

~~~
Apocryphon
Also, they failed to address screenwriters, who have a creative specialist
occupation that is vaguely more similar to software engineers.

~~~
SilasX
Interesting, never thought about that one. And it's also similar in terms of
tons of unqualified people trying to get in, and a low barrier to entry (in
terms of producing recognizable work)...

------
misiti3780
how does google have that many contractors?

~~~
dymk
Google pays competitively enough such that contractors agree to do work for
the company. They just don't get the benefits that a FTE get.

------
fipple
These CEO demand letters are always perplexing. Do the authors think this is a
representative government? The CEO represents the shareholders, not you. A
letter from an employee is like a letter from a RAM stick in a data center.

~~~
mbrumlow
While I agree the CEO works for the shareholders he also has to keep his ship
running. So sometimes the CEO will care about what employees say.

But I think at this point the CEO failed correct the problem of at hand and
now will have to deal with every injustice a few googlers see fit to scream
about.

From here on out all I can see is it getting worse, and then the shareholders
firing the CEO and replacing him with one who will deal with sort of issues
appropriately.

We can talk all day about what is appropriate, but I think many will agree you
can't have your employees hold a company hostage over political beliefs. But
then again, Google set themselves up with this problem with their silly hiring
practices.

