<story><title>Google illegally refusing to bargain with employee union, says NLRB</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/google_illegally_refusing_to_bargain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwhevvvvvsj</author><text>I literally had to take a training that said even if a “TVC” was a core contributor to a launch and the team got t-shirts, it was not allowed to give a shirt to the TVC. You can’t give a TVC a pencil without it being counted as “compensation”.&lt;p&gt;The way Googlers are fully accepting of what is clearly a tax dodge built on sacrificing the most pathetic acts of human dignity made me sick.</text></item><item><author>lokar</author><text>The vendor arrangement is in large part a pretext by Google to avoid their legal responsibilities.  Also, the workers have the right to negotiate about more then pay and benefits, they can bargain over working conditions which Google controls.</text></item><item><author>Manuel_D</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s pretty unclear to me what &amp;quot;refusing to bargain&amp;quot; means in this context. It sounds like these are employees of a different company, trying to bargain with Google instead of their employer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;As we&amp;#x27;ve said before, we have no objection to these Cognizant employees electing to form a union,&amp;quot; Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Register. &amp;quot;We simply believe it&amp;#x27;s only appropriate for Cognizant, as their employer, to engage in collective bargaining.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It details a similar situation with Accenture. Google&amp;#x27;s position makes sense here: Accenture and Cognizant set their employees pay, benefits, etc. So they should be the ones negotiating with the union. If I&amp;#x27;m a forward deployed engineer and I want better pay, I don&amp;#x27;t negotiate with the customer I&amp;#x27;m working with I negotiate with my boss.&lt;p&gt;Regardless, I don&amp;#x27;t think the union has much in the way of leverage here besides drumming up negative PR for Google. The Alphabet Workers Union apparently has ~1,400 members: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&amp;#x2F;#:~:text=Our%20union%20of%201400%2B%20members,our%20solidarity%20with%20one%20another&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&amp;#x2F;#:~:text=Our%20union%20...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Google has over 170,000 employees and ~120,000 contractors. Even if it were exclusive to employees, the Alphabet Workers Union accounts for less than 1% of Google&amp;#x27;s workforce.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>That lack of benefits is &lt;i&gt;legally mandated&lt;/i&gt;, thanks to some high-profile court cases. It isn&amp;#x27;t that Google or other companies simply &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t want&lt;/i&gt; to give those kinds of perks to contractors; no manager I&amp;#x27;ve worked with has &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt; begrudged the cost of these kinds of perks and many were just as annoyed that they couldn&amp;#x27;t give them to contractors. And it isn&amp;#x27;t that they want to classify those perks as &amp;quot;compensation&amp;quot; and somehow bill the contractor for them. It&amp;#x27;s that &lt;i&gt;if you give those kinds of benefits to a contractor, they can be involuntarily retroactively reclassified as an employee&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Before that legal precedent existed, many companies were a lot more free about sharing those kinds of fun perks (social events, apparel, stickers, fun things that don&amp;#x27;t have a substantial cost) with contractors. I would &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to go back to a world in which companies could freely do that and thought nothing of it. And in &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; world, if some company arbitrarily denied those kinds of perks to contractors I&amp;#x27;d agree that that was the company being unpleasant for no good reason.&lt;p&gt;If you want to complain about companies using contractors in places where you think they should be using employees, by all means do. There are certainly cases where companies use contractors where they should be using employees, and for that matter vice versa. There are also cases where contractors are a better choice (e.g. variable&amp;#x2F;uncertain needs over time, employees of third-party companies that don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to be employees).&lt;p&gt;But if you accept that there are &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; valid reasons to have contractors and not just employees, &lt;i&gt;the legal requirements that you can&amp;#x27;t give benefits to contractors are legal requirements imposed on the company, not arbitrary indignities invented by the company&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google illegally refusing to bargain with employee union, says NLRB</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/google_illegally_refusing_to_bargain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwhevvvvvsj</author><text>I literally had to take a training that said even if a “TVC” was a core contributor to a launch and the team got t-shirts, it was not allowed to give a shirt to the TVC. You can’t give a TVC a pencil without it being counted as “compensation”.&lt;p&gt;The way Googlers are fully accepting of what is clearly a tax dodge built on sacrificing the most pathetic acts of human dignity made me sick.</text></item><item><author>lokar</author><text>The vendor arrangement is in large part a pretext by Google to avoid their legal responsibilities.  Also, the workers have the right to negotiate about more then pay and benefits, they can bargain over working conditions which Google controls.</text></item><item><author>Manuel_D</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s pretty unclear to me what &amp;quot;refusing to bargain&amp;quot; means in this context. It sounds like these are employees of a different company, trying to bargain with Google instead of their employer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;As we&amp;#x27;ve said before, we have no objection to these Cognizant employees electing to form a union,&amp;quot; Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Register. &amp;quot;We simply believe it&amp;#x27;s only appropriate for Cognizant, as their employer, to engage in collective bargaining.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It details a similar situation with Accenture. Google&amp;#x27;s position makes sense here: Accenture and Cognizant set their employees pay, benefits, etc. So they should be the ones negotiating with the union. If I&amp;#x27;m a forward deployed engineer and I want better pay, I don&amp;#x27;t negotiate with the customer I&amp;#x27;m working with I negotiate with my boss.&lt;p&gt;Regardless, I don&amp;#x27;t think the union has much in the way of leverage here besides drumming up negative PR for Google. The Alphabet Workers Union apparently has ~1,400 members: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&amp;#x2F;#:~:text=Our%20union%20of%201400%2B%20members,our%20solidarity%20with%20one%20another&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&amp;#x2F;#:~:text=Our%20union%20...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Google has over 170,000 employees and ~120,000 contractors. Even if it were exclusive to employees, the Alphabet Workers Union accounts for less than 1% of Google&amp;#x27;s workforce.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voiceblue</author><text>Can someone knowledgeable explain this “tax dodge”? I was under the impression that the issue GP underlines (giving a contractor shirt&amp;#x2F;pencil) is more about avoiding misclassification and stems from a lawsuit by Microsoft contractors claiming to be common law employees based on how they were treated and then demanding additional employee-only benefits.</text></comment>