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Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

theguardian.com

41–50 of 258 posts

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they're getting paid [1] for their efforts! [1] https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower "The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected." From this post…

It’s pretty messed up that “defrauding investors” is the legal action most likely to succeed in court and not, ya know, defrauding the people they actually defrauded.

Yep, seems to be a lot of that [1] going around.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28484294

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#42

Time for a class action against Google. The whole industry could have depressed wages from their actions.

Today in "class action over the whole industry having depresed wages from their actions" history, this month marks the 21st anniversary of the DoJ filing a complaint against Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe for agreeing not to poach each other's employees. The companies eventually settled a civil class action suit for $415 million.

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#43
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civil law vs. criminal law: Punishment > Another important distinction between civil and criminal law is the type of penalty paid for being found guilty. In a criminal case, if the individual charged with a crime loses the case, they’re likely facing incarceration or some type of probation. For civil cases, the resolution to a case doesn’t result in the “losing” party going to jail. Often the judgement results in a…

> Section 2 makes it an offence to commit fraud by false representation in any form. For a representation to be false, the representation being made must be wrong or misleading, and the person making it must know that it is, or might be, wrong or misleading.[0] I think it is reasonable to presume that by paying it's contractors, Google and by virtue it's executive team was representing to said contractor that they we…

>costing potentially tens of thousands of people life changing amounts of money

Have any numbers on this implication? How much is life changing in your opinion? Is there evidence this many people were shorted near that amount?

It's hard to imagine that local wages are life changing for those "potentially tens of thousands of people" but paying market clearing wages would be significantly different.

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#45

Time for a class action against Google. The whole industry could have depressed wages from their actions.

Today in "class action over the whole industry having depresed wages from their actions" history, this month marks the 21st anniversary of the DoJ filing a complaint against Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe for agreeing not to poach each other's employees. The companies eventually settled a civil class action suit for $415 million.

It wasn't enough to correct their malevolent behavior. Alphabet's assets should be frozen pending a full investigation.

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#46

Sounds like they were caught red handed, mens rea and all. Any chance this ends up with serious repercussions like prison time?

The feds shouldn't do anything until bonuses are handed out to the board of directors then snag them all away. Options, stocks, hard cash, a new car? Yoink!

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they're getting paid [1] for their efforts! [1] https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower "The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected." From this post…

It’s pretty messed up that “defrauding investors” is the legal action most likely to succeed in court and not, ya know, defrauding the people they actually defrauded.

That's a jurisdiction issue though. Of course, the underlying cause is that the US, unlike other countries, doesn't have a pay parity law for US-employed temps.

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#49

> Google executives have been aware since at least May 2019 that the company was failing to comply with local laws in the UK, Europe and Asia that mandate temporary workers be paid equal rates to full-time employees performing similar work, internal Google documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian show. > But rather than immediately correct the errors, the company dragged its feet for more than two years, the doc…

As I keep saying: there’s nothing more dangerous than a company (or department in this case) that was once wildly profitable and is now merely profitable. It’s absurd that even at places like Google, which has effectively infinite money, there’s still this present attitude of not being able to afford paying workers. Nuts.

Its not really "dangerous" only because that wording implies another state of possible affairs that could be safer.

unfortunately, ceteris paribus, the tendency of a rate of profit to ultimately slow is one of the costs of a free market, there is not really a way out of it long term!

Re: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers

#50

Personal Googler story: In Ads and in Search, at least as of 2010 or so, Google employed independent companies who hired "raters" to provide "ground truth" for the ML systems. For example, they would rate proposed ads for a given query, so that the ML system could learn from their "truth". For Search, they'd rate proposed search results for a given query. There was a whole pipeline to bring in the raters' results and…

Was it Leapforce or Lionbridge? I used to do search rating for both of those.
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