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Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

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Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#61

Post by ChuckMcM »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #57
ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard variants on this as well but haven't seen any actual data or research that supports this notion. If you come across any I'd be interested in reading that. There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal department I'm pretty su…

>There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. That's why you layer it so the people taking the risk are little more than hourly employees themselves. Big corp hire cleaning corp to clean. Cleaning corp hires local cleaner to clean. Local cleaner hires legal worker wit…

As I said, I understand this narrative is out there, what I have not been able to find is any evidence that this occurs at any sort of scale or more explicitly with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts.

In California at least the SEIU union is all over employers and both well funded and well motivated to root out such abuses of the system. That they don't find them and there aren't big stories about companies they are taking to court, suggests to me that in all their looking they have yet to find this situation to actually exist.

I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying that I haven't seen any evidence that this is happening.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#62

Post by ams6110 »

lliamander wrote: post #59
ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard variants on this as well but haven't seen any actual data or research that supports this notion. If you come across any I'd be interested in reading that. There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal department I'm pretty su…

Well, in some states it is illegal to ask a potential employee about their citizenship status. There are definitely industries in which hiring (suspected, but very likely) illegal immigrants is standard practice.

Citizenship perhaps not, but it's not at all illegal to ask whether a prospective employee is legally able to work in the United States, and upon hire it's required to demand documentation to prove it. The form is called the I-9.

https://www.uscis.gov/i-9

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#63

Post by rhizome »

Retric wrote: post #36
ChuckMcM wrote: post #33

The key is the onboarding program. Bakeries are nice, they have a range of jobs that go from very simple (sweeping up and cleaning) to very complex (scheduling different products for baking). If you have that range you can absorb a lot of different people. That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting firm, this is v…

A significant potion of this is an end run around immigration law. Cleaning companies need to compete with companies willing to employ illegal immigrants for very low wages which drives down the costs below what companies like IBM would pay people. Change some of these loopholes and the outsourcing overhead becomes far more significant. Though employing large numbers of part time workers works better at scale so the…

A significant potion of this is an end run around immigration law.

Is it? A friend of mine works in documents at an old-school whiteshoe law firm and they converted all of their administrative staff to a 3rd party a couple years ago. He didn't get fired or laid off, he just works for the other company now.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#64

Post by ChuckMcM »

lliamander wrote: post #59
ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard variants on this as well but haven't seen any actual data or research that supports this notion. If you come across any I'd be interested in reading that. There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal department I'm pretty su…

Well, in some states it is illegal to ask a potential employee about their citizenship status. There are definitely industries in which hiring (suspected, but very likely) illegal immigrants is standard practice.

In all US states you are required to fill out an I-9 form if you are hired. That form requires that you "prove" to your employer that you have a legal right to work in the United States and you are required to provide a valid Social Security number or Tax ID number.

If you fail to do that, you violate the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which was passed in 1986 and subjects the business to fines, penalties, potentially the loss of business licenses and prosecution under the RICO act.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#65

Post by Retric »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #61
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. That's why you layer it so the people taking the risk are little more than hourly employees themselves. Big corp hire cleaning corp to clean. Cleaning corp hires local cleaner to clean. Local cleaner hires legal worker wit…

As I said, I understand this narrative is out there, what I have not been able to find is any evidence that this occurs at any sort of scale or more explicitly with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts. In California at least the SEIU union is all over employers and both well funded and well motivated to root out such abuses of the system. That they don't find them and there aren'…

> with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-... Target is a ~45 billion dollar company.

It's all tiny local cleaning companies. So, sure it's not corporate policy to do X or Y nationally. But, they are not going to object to saving some money.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#66

Post by fipple »

Retric wrote: post #36
ChuckMcM wrote: post #33

The key is the onboarding program. Bakeries are nice, they have a range of jobs that go from very simple (sweeping up and cleaning) to very complex (scheduling different products for baking). If you have that range you can absorb a lot of different people. That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting firm, this is v…

A significant potion of this is an end run around immigration law. Cleaning companies need to compete with companies willing to employ illegal immigrants for very low wages which drives down the costs below what companies like IBM would pay people. Change some of these loopholes and the outsourcing overhead becomes far more significant. Though employing large numbers of part time workers works better at scale so the…

Not just immigration law but many types of laws and also benefits. It looks very bad to have worse health insurance for some employees than others, but you need good insurance to recruit top professionals. Solution: make all of the other people non-employees.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#67

Post by Inconel »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #33

The key is the onboarding program. Bakeries are nice, they have a range of jobs that go from very simple (sweeping up and cleaning) to very complex (scheduling different products for baking). If you have that range you can absorb a lot of different people. That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting firm, this is v…

I’m writing this on my phone while on break so I can’t get as detailed as I’d like but I just wanted to express agreement with your point regarding the effects of low level jobs being outsourced to contractors.

I don’t want to get too specific in my role but I was able to go from a very entry level position at SpaceX, let’s say something along the lines of kitchen/cafeteria/janitorial/facilities staff, to a much more technical position working on actual launch vehicle hardware. I know I’m not the only one that’s moved up from those positions into our technician roles. It actually happens somewhat regularly. I can’t imagine this being the case if all of our lower level positions were outsourced to contractors.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#68

Post by ChuckMcM »

Retric wrote: post #65
ChuckMcM wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, I understand this narrative is out there, what I have not been able to find is any evidence that this occurs at any sort of scale or more explicitly with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts. In California at least the SEIU union is all over employers and both well funded and well motivated to root out such abuses of the system. That they don't find them and there aren'…

> with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-... Target is a ~45 billion dollar company. It's all tiny local cleaning companies. So, sure it's not corporate policy to do X or Y nationally. But, they are not going to object to saving some money.

That is perfect, thanks so much. Interesting bit here is what I would expect from Target:

The issue instead was that their employer, Jim’s Maintenance, was failing to fulfill its obligations to keep proper records, including records of I-9 compliance. This failure to fulfill its contractual obligations ultimately contributed to Target’s decision to terminate its contract with Jim’s Maintenance.

So company offers services to Target, uses workers that are undocumented. Target severs the relationship as soon as they "know"[1] that the company is a bad actor which puts this company out of business.

This is how it is supposed to work, which is that people do things that are bad, they get discovered and they end up losing more than they gained from their bad behavior.

But to my original point, Target understood the legal risk of hiring a firm that hired people who were not authorized to work in the US, and once they were made aware of it they stopped. In California this is something the SEIU does, if they suspect a company is using illegal workers they will go tell people who employ them that what they are doing in a paper trail sort of way (registered mail etc). That forces the company to break that relationship. As a result, it is quite difficult to run this sort of thing and harder to make any money at it. All this has the appropriate chilling effect.

[1] I realize that clearly someone inside the Target stores knew this was going on, but in this case it is once the corporate entity knew. I'm curious if the store manager was fired or not.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#69

Post by Retric »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #68
Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with any sort of company with more than a few million in annual gross receipts. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-... Target is a ~45 billion dollar company. It's all tiny local cleaning companies. So, sure it's not corporate policy to do X or Y nationally. But, they are not going to object to saving some money.

That is perfect, thanks so much. Interesting bit here is what I would expect from Target: The issue instead was that their employer, Jim’s Maintenance, was failing to fulfill its obligations to keep proper records, including records of I-9 compliance. This failure to fulfill its contractual obligations ultimately contributed to Target’s decision to terminate its contract with Jim’s Maintenance. So company offers serv…

~5% of the US workforce is an illegal immigrant. That’s a lot of wink wink nod nod going on.

So, sure when a huge lawsuit shows up Target is going to fire that company. But, notice the issue was not the workers bing undocumented it’s them making below minimum wage and then suing Target.

Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked

#70

Post by munchbunny »

ilovetux wrote: post #53
munchbunny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect with IT you run into a general trust issue, since IT often operates in an information-privileged environment. I would love to see better tools and technical infrastructure for requiring authorization to touch sensitive data, so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you need but no more." Something like that would both protect customer privacy and de-risk hiring at the entry le…

> so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you need but no more." I think SELinux addresses this problem pretty well, but there is no real requirement to give access to developers for a production database when a development database could be setup with test data. I'm not arguing that this is a great idea for IT, but trust has been an issue from the beginning and there are more than a c…

> there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality

I think you raise a good point. If I were to phrase my wish better, I think it comes down to your implication that "varying degrees of quality" means some solutions do the job better (like SELinux) and some that do it worse. The more work it takes, the more you end up with startups where everyone has the passwords to the production database because it's just easier operationally. But when you do that, then you start to get into institutionalized risks like Uber employees stalking exes. I'm well aware that this is a case of engineering a solution to cover the 0.01% case, but when it comes to sensitive data, you're usually guarding against a tiny number of bad actors who could do a lot of damage.

As an example, let's say you want certain developers to have access to non-sensitive parts of a Postgres database, and you want to be able to temporarily authorize developers with worthy exceptions to touch sensitive data, and you want to leave an audit trail. Let's say you're doing it this way because of HIPAA. It's currently a pain to do, and you'll have to write a bunch of automation to make it work. Now let's say you also have some S3 stores or ETL pipelines using Kinesis, and you have potentially sensitive data in there too. In the ideal case, you could manage the roles and groups and elevations in a more central place, federate those identities over to the Postgres cluster, SSH permissions, etc. That way data and privacy controls could actually be lightweight, which I think would be an overall win for the industry.

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