The whole value proposition of a contractor is that you can onboard them quickly when you need to augment your existing staff, and can terminate them just as fast when they’re no longer needed. This is in no way a layoff or mass firing, it’s a standard contract termination that occurs all the time with tech companies.
The “previously assured jobs were safe” claim is ungrounded in the article, which lamely provides little more than an anonymous source mentioning an unnamed Apple employee: “One of the contractors reportedly said that Apple previously assured the workers that their jobs were safe.”
It sucks but that's the whole point of hiring and being a contract worker.
It's an even more tenuous position than full-time employee and frankly I think it's good that contract workers were laid off ahead of any full time workers. I'm not sure why some people are trying to frame this as bad or immoral. It's the entire point of contract workers and you know that coming in as a contract worker. It's disappointing but that's the reality of the situation.
Some contract workers are just full-time employees with less benefits. It's entirely normal to expect long-term employment in that case. They are usually not hired for adhoc workloads.
if you're a contractor who's just a full-time employee with less benefits, you should take that up with your local labour relations board, because that's illegal in almost any jurisdiction.
contractors should not expect long-term employment unless they have a contract that specifies that.
You refer to a legal process for managing this, but this category (wage theft) is the largest category of theft in the US - it's rampant, unchecked, and stacked against the victims. Something being illegal doesn't always have much connection to whether it's happening and what recourse is available.
I'm not sure, where are you getting those figures from? I can't find solid figures for either but the rough figures (guesstimates) I come across seem to indicate time theft is a larger problem than wage theft.
>According to one estimate from the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, reported and unreported wage theft could amount to as much as $50 billion per year owed to workers.
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>That number dwarfs criminal offenses such as robbery, which accounted for just under $500 million in losses in 2019, according to FBI data. Burglary accounted for about $3 billion in losses that same year, and motor vehicle theft made up about $6 billion.
These are estimates. You can also find estimates for time theft in the same ballpark. Solid figures are much lower —estimates are higher as they have to extrapolate into areas with little data.
These contractors might not be in a position to do that. I've been such contractor in the past. I was just happy to have the job to pay my bills and didn't feel like getting myself and others fired.
The other day I saw a position to work at Google as a contractor. It said undetermined duration.
yes, but if you're in the position described in this article - a misclassified contractor who no longer has a job, then you've got nothing to lose by reporting that misclassification. if the labour board has enough reports of it to develop a pattern, it can help prevent it from happening in the future.
Consider... a W2 employee working for a consultancy. That consultancy is responsible for some level of staffing / staff augmentation at one or more companies.
Does this still fall in the domain of independent contractor misclassification?
I don’t think that lower cost (if it actually is lower-cost, given that the contracting agencies take a significant cut) is the only reason why the workers were contracted instead of directly employed.
The issue is that, combined with hospital billing shenanigans, health insurance et al is tied to being a full-time employee. If you don't qualify for/can't afford government healthcare programs, you might go bankrupt from the hospital bill for an ambulance ride.
So where does the blame lay: on the USA for not offering public healthcare, or on companies for "exploiting" what is quite clearly a bus-sized loophole in the system?
It's not a loophole, it's part of the point of being a contractor. You have a temporary relationship that doesn't have all the requirements of a full-time employee. When I hire a handyman to come do some repairs at my house, I shouldn't have to provide health insurance for him.
On the USA for not offering real public healthcare. The USA spends twice as much of its cumulative wealth on healthcare and has worse outcomes for all but a small minority who are willing to pay top dollar. In relation to how any other first world country operates, health insurance premiums in the USA are effectively a privatised, for-profit system of taxation.
The system is basically a middle finger to the bottom 50% of the country — by increasing poverty, by accentuating the consequences of poverty, and impeding the upward mobility of people in poverty.
Every contractor I’ve known has done so with the downside being what you said, and choosing the upside of more flexible work or higher pay. People don’t seem to be forced into contracting?
Sure I guess the same way I have a choice between having a job and unemployment. Not an ideal system I agree, but until we get universal income or my startup IPOs thems the breaks.
In a LOT of cases it's neither short term or temporary, you would be surprised how many temps/contractors/vendors/whatever at these companies have been there for years, sat at a desk in their buildings, learned their tech stacks and developed products, ate lunch at their cafeterias, etc....
The IRS ensured that contract workers cannot work at a company for more than a certain amount of time before they are automatically turned into employees. That's why companies rotate contract workers off jobs when they hit a certain time limit.
I took offense to his line of reasoning that contract workers should be happy with their disposable circumstances. As opposed to being annoyed that the conditions for a disposable workforce exist in the first place.
There are a ton of valid reasons to have a disposable workforce - seasonal employees, specialists who do work outside of the company's core competencies, temporary employees to fill the roles of those who are out on disability/family leave/what have you, etc. There are totally reasonable needs for these kinds of employees, and if you didn't have contract workers you'd just be hiring them as FTEs and then firing them shortly thereafter. I think it's clearly better for the employee to understand the temporary nature of their job.
Again, I objected to his line of reasoning that you shouldn't be able to complain about being seen as a more disposable form of labor vs full time employees. "You signed up for this" kind of rhetoric is just silly. It's ok to express empathy for those let go, you don't have to carefully dissect their life choices that lead them to this point.
You are lying and putting words in my mouth. I never said they should be happy about it. But the reality is that they have a temporary position, not a permanent position and they should accept this reality. They were hired as a temporary worker, not a permanent worker. End of story. There is no confusion here.
If they are looking for a permanent position, they should find a job with a permanent position. If those jobs aren't available or they aren't qualified for them... are you saying they deserve a permanent position anyway?
"I took offense to his line of reasoning that contract workers should be happy with their disposable circumstances."
>You are lying and putting words in my mouth.
Ok, lets just use your own words to work through this.
>they should accept this reality.
How about "I took offense to his line of reasoning that contract workers should just accept this reality."
Is that better for you?
You're also entirely missing the nuance of this conversation wherein a system exists for Apple to exploit a labor force and avoid the extra costs associated with fulltime employment (healthcare, benefits, etc). In your worldview, this is entirely reasonable and the trillion dollar company exploiting these workers is entirely above reproach. It is in fact the fault of the employees for either being too shortsighted with their contract employment or just not good enough to qualify for things like healthcare.
See why that might come across as gross to someone?
> How about "I took offense to his line of reasoning that contract workers should just accept this reality."
Yes, this is better. They need to accept their reality. They can't accept a temporary job and they cry when their temporary job gets cancelled. It's the reality of their situation. They shouldn't be happy about it in the same way that coal miners shouldn't be happy about working in a coal mine, but sometimes that's just how life works out.
> a system exists for Apple to exploit a labor force
I completely disagree they are being exploited. Some jobs are permanent and some jobs are temporary. That's reality. Do you expect waiters and cab drivers to be full time employees as well? Should M&A consultants working on a project be made permanent employees as well? Should football players be permanent employees? I certainly don't.
Some type of logical fallacy in the line of reasoning connecting your "quoted" text to the op.
Exploit (Oxford def.): "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)."
Contractor (Oxford def.): "a person or company that undertakes a contract to provide materials or labor to perform a service or do a job"
Did Apple mislead these people into thinking their contracts were indefinite or not potentially bound by some end date? Did Apple retract guaranteed equity in the company?
This is literally what the contractor market is for: provide resources in increasing and decreasing amount due to market demands.
I certainly sympathize for the long tenured full time tech employees getting laid off. I really sympathize with the fact that contractors tend to be non-native or immigrant demographics, or out-sourced to other countries. Maybe that's what you were talking about, but seems like an intentionally generaliezd critique of the contracting industry.
Companies don't owe workers a permanent position. The company has a certain amount of permanent positions and a certain amount of temporary positions. The contract workers, for whatever reason, chose the temporary position. Either they didn't want to permanent position, or they wanted the permanent position but they weren't good enough to compete for the permanent position and got a temporary position instead.
Regardless, are you saying that the company owes these people a permanent position?
This article references a nytimes article. This article has no regional reference for the workers.
It was recently reported that Apple was experiencing 50% defect rate in India where this newspaper seems to be from.
Could be that Apple had higher expectations.
> According to a report in the New York Post, over the last few days, Apple has laid off hundreds of contract workers – workers that were actually employed by outside agencies but worked alongside Apple employees on various projects.
"they are forced to work more than a mile away from Apple’s “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. at a facility which, in addition to relatively ho-hum architecture, lacks free snacks."
I do have sympathy for people that thought they were on a 6/12/whatever month contract and let go early. But this NY Post article is really reaching.
It's unclear whether this article has any direct reporting or new information. Twice it references the New York Times, though with no link. It seems strangely written and may only be a (possibly bad) paraphrase of other articles.
> According to a report in the New York Post, over the last few days, Apple has laid off hundreds of contract workers – workers that were actually employed by outside agencies but worked alongside Apple employees on various projects.
No big deal here, hence they are contractors. Interesting though is the timing of this, I remember reading last week (?) about the inconsistent quality from the Indian factories could be why this was posted
Getting rid of all your contractors is a way of looking like you haven't done layoffs. (In all fairness, that's part of the deal a contractor agrees to. However many of these people were employees of a temp agency or “headshop” and weren’t necessarily benefiting financially from this arrangement.)
That's what contracting is about. Getting hired quickly, usually getting higher hourly rate than employees with the downside of it being a temporary engagement and being the first to go when times are tough.
This would be like a newspaper being outraged about someone cancelling their subscription because they thought the subscription was safe.
That doesn't appear to be what Apple & Google etc are doing. The contractors aren't short-term troubleshooters or hired for a project. They're long-term quasi-employees, working alongside employees, often doing similar tasks as employees, just outsourced via a staffing-agency.
They're often paid less than employees (e.g. today's article [1] that includes a part on raters at Google alleges that they get $14 while Google's minimum hourly pay for any employee is $15), and the agency is the one taking the blame for mistreatment while the company can say "we didn't know! that's terrible!" and then get the next staffing agency, tell them exactly what they want, and have another fall guy to take the blame.
It's not about "we need a hundred people for the next 5 weeks on this, quick", it's about not hiring non-essential employees directly. Google will hire the PhDs, but not the quality raters or content moderators, because they are much easier to replace and there's no value to Google in employing them directly while they'd take PR hit if they were the actual employer (even though they're the ones saying what to do, when to do it and how to do it, which is often used as a test whether you're an employee or a contractor).
The “previously assured jobs were safe” claim is ungrounded in the article, which lamely provides little more than an anonymous source mentioning an unnamed Apple employee: “One of the contractors reportedly said that Apple previously assured the workers that their jobs were safe.”