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Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

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Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#21

Post by throwaway0a5e »

donkeyd wrote: post #12

> Love the good pay. > It pays relatively well ($15 per hour for most contract workers). How is that relatively well? Compared to McDonald's employees, probably. Compared to other actual technical jobs, like electrician, I can't imagine. Compared to Google devs, not at all. Working 40 hours a week with no vacation that's about 31k. Being a contractor means no sick leave, vacation days, pension, insurance, etc. The US…

"other actual technical jobs, like electrician," have barriers to entry.

Ms Wait would have to break her back schlepping spools around a jobsite for a few years before she could get onto the actual electrician career track.

Before they took away the light at the end of the tunnel schlepping batteries around for Google was just as good.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#23

Post by taurath »

jasode wrote: post #13

>Contractors love the good pay and engaging work in Google's data centers. They resent that Google and its staffing firm, Modis Engineering, make them quit every two years. >[...] But those two-year contracts are written in stone. Workers like Wait are not usually allowed to apply either to renew their contracts or to do the same job as a Google employee. If they want to keep working in the same job, they have to lea…

The right thing for the company to do would be to hire people as employees, but it appears that worker protections are too strong for them to want to financially.

Universal healthcare/dental/paid leave would allow for companies who’s employees currently are the only receivers of these “benefits” to not require companies to hold onto people so long.

Worker protections are supposed to be so that catastrophic job loss is less catastrophic and companies can’t just arbitrarily decide they need 20000 people one month and 0 the next. But we should definitely look into a better deal for the workers and give companies less power over their livelihood.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#24

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mraza007 wrote: post #14

Aren’t data center employees crucial as they are making sure your services are running perfectly even in an event of emergency. Why not hire them and pay them better wages

To be blunt: Because they don’t have to.

If they were struggling to find or retain talent or if they weren’t getting the caliber of employee required, they would certainly increase wages as they did with engineers.

When I was tangentially involved with a datacenter company several years ago, they had hundreds of qualified applicants for every job opening. It’s a job that a lot of people want but with few openings.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#25

Post by ahelwer »

jasode wrote: post #13

>Contractors love the good pay and engaging work in Google's data centers. They resent that Google and its staffing firm, Modis Engineering, make them quit every two years. >[...] But those two-year contracts are written in stone. Workers like Wait are not usually allowed to apply either to renew their contracts or to do the same job as a Google employee. If they want to keep working in the same job, they have to lea…

I also had to engage with this bodyshop arrangement. Heard a fellow contractor referring to it as "paying the pimp", which I guess has some similarities.

It's worth noting that you can usually contract directly with a company as long as you maintain scoped part-time contracts with multiple companies, instead of a single open-ended long-term contract with a single company. It's true that independent contractors are somewhat disadvantaged by this whole setup, but we should also recognize that voluntary independent freelance contracting of this type is quite a privileged position and it's good our desired style of work isn't being used to undermine the rights of W-2 employees.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#26

Post by cloche »

I know someone who works as a contractor for Google (not through Modis). It's quite odd. They had to go through a lot of Google specified training, they only work for Google, their manager is someone from Google, the computer was supplied from Google, they're doing work that is directed by Google, they receive performance feedback from Google. But at the day, they're officially employed by this vendor company. I just don't see how it can be argued that people like this are not really employed by Google. If Google doesn't need this job anymore, this staffing company isn't going to retain them. It's not like they have other clients where they can redirect the person to as far as I can tell.

Why is it that Google uses these staffing firms? I get that they don't want to provide the same benefits to lower skilled workers but then why not just have 2 sets of benefits? One for higher skilled employees and one for lower skilled employees? I suppose the other answer is when it comes to layoffs, it won't be in the news because these types of workers are not officially employed by Google.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#27

Post by pessimizer »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #21
donkeyd wrote: post #12

> Love the good pay. > It pays relatively well ($15 per hour for most contract workers). How is that relatively well? Compared to McDonald's employees, probably. Compared to other actual technical jobs, like electrician, I can't imagine. Compared to Google devs, not at all. Working 40 hours a week with no vacation that's about 31k. Being a contractor means no sick leave, vacation days, pension, insurance, etc. The US…

"other actual technical jobs, like electrician," have barriers to entry. Ms Wait would have to break her back schlepping spools around a jobsite for a few years before she could get onto the actual electrician career track. Before they took away the light at the end of the tunnel schlepping batteries around for Google was just as good.

> Ms Wait would have to break her back schlepping spools around a jobsite for a few years before she could get onto the actual electrician career track.

Ms Wait would be paid >=$15 to do this.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#28

Post by yanderekko »

the_jeremy wrote: post #11

Unlike Uber, Google has proactively taken steps to ensure contractors are not able to be considered employees. If Google wants to use contractors, for one reason or another, lawyers have told them they need to take these sort of steps. This whole article is basically complaining that being a contractor sucks because the law forces Google to follow these sorts of practices, but then blames Google for following these s…

Yep. It's an awkward situation. A lot of the data engineers I work with are CWs, and under the circumstances of normal interaction they're pretty much indistinguishable from FTEs. But there are all sorts of compliance reasons for why you aren't supposed to treat them as real "team members" with all the attendant perks and privileges. Many ICs will not even realize that their colleagues are CWs since it's not the default presumption.

The "solution" of just converting them all to FTEs and effectively giving them massive boosts in total compensation is impractical. So this awkward, hushed reality is likely to continue as a least-bad solution.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#29

Post by Frost1x »

donkeyd wrote: post #12

> Love the good pay. > It pays relatively well ($15 per hour for most contract workers). How is that relatively well? Compared to McDonald's employees, probably. Compared to other actual technical jobs, like electrician, I can't imagine. Compared to Google devs, not at all. Working 40 hours a week with no vacation that's about 31k. Being a contractor means no sick leave, vacation days, pension, insurance, etc. The US…

>The US is such an odd country.

It's not odd once you understand our culture celebrates and almost worships exploitation of some form or the other. It may be exploitation of science and engineering leading to technological growth that we can all share, it may be exploitation of natural resources we've found for a bargain, it may be exploitation of human labor finding how the least amounts can be spent of necessary labor to maximize revenue.

The recent focus to me seems to be on targeting labor and optimizing those costs since the low hanging socially acceptable fruits are starting to give diminishing returns that can't meet some peoples' insatiable appetites for financial growth. This contract position is yet another story of yet another casuality in the cost optimization war by business against human labor expenses.

Re: Forced unemployment and second-class status: Google's data center contractors

#30

Post by yanderekko »

mraza007 wrote: post #14

Aren’t data center employees crucial as they are making sure your services are running perfectly even in an event of emergency. Why not hire them and pay them better wages

A lot of the workers are FTEs, hence the "class system". Those FTEs are likely the ones that would handle such emergencies.
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