Google coughs up $5.5m to make recruiters 'screwed out of overtime pay' go away Google has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the ads broker of failing to pay overtime to contract workers. The aggrieved freelancers asked the Santa Clara County Court in California to approve a deal in which Google and contract staffing agency Urpan Technologies will pay $5.5m to a bunch of workers who …
Ok, so it's not on the same scale of alleged grottiness that is Uber, but it's pretty crummy.
Remember "Do no evil"? I think that Google need to seriously think carefully about their entire business strategy.
They're picking up large fines regularly these days in Europe, with more to come (tax, Android monopoly using Play Servers, search, etc). They're getting hauled up on things like this and losing money to them. Some of their own shareholders were/are suing over such financial loses. They've been so lax on content moderation that advertisers have been shamed into a boycott. Their "fix" to appease the advertisers is not placating various governments who don't care for Google's efforts at "de-monetisation" and want to see more "deletion" of illegal, hateful content and easier identification of the people who put it there in the first place. There have been headlines such as "Google, the Terrorist's Friend" in newspapers. We can add to that the near inevitable failure of their self driving car project at quite some expense (everyone else's self-driving project will also fail). Then there's the fallout from various government's plans to regulate online OTT services like YouTube; that'll likely impact on the casual contributor as appeasing the governments is likely to mean an end to anonymous user accounts, amongst other things. At some point even the US competition authorities are going to start finding it hard to ignore the near monopoly Google have on various "utility" online services, and they're going to get broken up.
There's the distant but no longer implausible threat to the acceptability of Javascript and all client-side web execution technologies (ASLR unwinding in such things means that browser / Javascript exploits are potentially back on the cards). If people conclude that arbitrary code execution client side can never be safe, Google's online services cannot be delivered. And then there's their generally chaotic approach to what services are flavour of the month and what ones get discontinued with little notice. AFAIK they've been out-performance by Mircosoft's Azure, and Amazon's AWS. I mean, Mircosoft?!?!?! And as for the state of the Anroid ecosystem - yeurk, just bleurghghg, and they've failed to use it to gain leverage in China (Ok, difficult) and India.
Adding to the pile of poor PR by quibbling about a mere $5.5million at this point in time is surely senseless.
Google are a young company, and they behave like one. But at some point they need to shape up and look like they're in it for the long run. Sure, they're making a ton of cash at the moment; how can a company that profitable being doing anything wrong? But it also feels like they're wasting a ton of cash too. The few core shareholders have complete control over the company due to the massively unbalanced corporate governance structure, so they're not going to get anyone coming in from the outside to help them improve. It will remain the "plaything" of those core shareholders.
It's difficult to imagine now how they could ever suffer a major collapse. But to guarantee that not happening there's a few trends that could do with reversing. Looking back to their old, original motto and paying attention to it would be a good start.
I think they did that some years ago - and concluded the best solution was to drop the "Do no Evil" slogan.
It was all a huge misunderstanding in the first place. The original question was "Will Google abuse its position?" and the unfortunately misinterpreted answer was "We do know evil".
Google never intended to say that they wouldn't do anything bad, they just meant that anything they did that was bad was wholly deliberate. When you think of it that way, it makes a LOT more sense.
""Defendants set numeric limits on the amount of overtime hours that contract recruiters were allowed to report. At times, the numeric limit was zero overtime hours. At the same time, defendants suffered and permitted plaintiffs and the other class members to work additional, unpaid overtime hours in order to succeed in their jobs and meet performance metrics."
Anyone who works for a US company will experience this... particularly the last bit... :|
The plaintiffs were working for UrpanTech, an Indian outsourcer.
Google told UrpanTech they wouldn't pay for overtime.
The contractors presumably had contracts with UrpanTech, not Google, so unless UrpanTech had the contractors contract out of any overtime payments they should be on the hook for said payments.
Moral of the story is: Contractors, read your contract BEFORE you start a job! You might be surprised what's in there...
Doesn't the US have *ANY* laws to protect employees? I know a lot of states are "at will", but FFS, this is just taking the biscuit! It's like some 3rd world economy. Yeah, workers get paid for their work, sometimes, but doesn't the fact they show up for work every day require a little bit of loyalty from the employer, even if it's brought about and forced by legislation? I know "socialism" is a dirty word in the Land of the Free, but you guys really ought to think about hanging onto the baby before you throw the bathwater out. No one should ever have to sue just to get the pay they earned, let alone get sacked for having the temerity to complain about it.
Yes and no.
Yes, the laws exist, but unless you can afford a lawyer, you're screwed, because the agencies that are supposed fight for you, are massively underfunded. Want to guess by which party?
The last time someone tried to pull this on me I raised serious stink. I did get my money, but was fired shortly thereafter.
And guess what? I couldn't afford a lawyer so no retaliation suit was filed.
I've said it before and it always bears repeating: A U.S. company will try to screw you just as hard as a Chinese, India or Russian company will.
As for any reform, the pain obviously isn't bad enough yet. You see, many Americans, instead of seeing what the rich and powerful are doing and demanding they be thrown in jail, instead wonder how they can get in on the action. Being Lord King Boofoo is more important to them than social justice.
Exactly,
And while Enterprise Vampires like IBM don't ask for overtime without pay, they do shove all of the work at the Contractors, remove most of it from their staff, and as soon as its convenient for them, sack contractors in the name of "cost cutting". VAMPIRES...
Hire and Fire is the American way, it seems.
I'm convinced this costs American companies, and therefore shareholders, a ton of cash. Every time you fire all your expertise, you'll get less of it back when you re-hire. More and more of your R&D budget goes into re-growing expertise and making big mistakes, whilst less of it goes into actual product development. As technology and engineering get more and more complex, the problem gets worse. Boeing, P&W, GE, MS, etc, have all suffered from this as a result.
The current trends for AI and self driving cars is also about a lack expertise; shareholders are being hoodwinked by generally young teams of "engineers" who are all saying "yeah we can do this". Yet anyone with any actual experience in safety certification would be telling the shareholders that, at best, it'll never get to be anything more than an advanced cruise control still requiring sober, licensed drivers. The marketing expertise would then point out that thousands of dollars of extra equipment on a car isn't going to be commercially viable if, fundamentally, it doesn't let you travel whilst pissed / asleep / unlicensed / making out...
Cohesive teams become very good, takes about 15, 20 years. The original Skunk Works was like that, and they did amazing things; they stayed together for a long time, and their peak, F117, was truly amazing value for money.
The second half is:-
- how to be a PHB
- lie with a straight face
- Fiddle the accounts
- Play Golf to climb the greasy pole to a corner office especially appropriate behaviour at the 19th
and importantly
- Know when to quit just before the biz goes TITSUP for good.
I have an MBA but Shhh don't tell anyone. It is not on my CV for obvious reasons but it is great for taking those PWC etc drones down a few pegs when the come calling.
"when Ha complained about the unpaid overtime work, her bosses, permanent Google employees, fired her in retaliation."
And this would be SOP. My experience as a contractor involved a "discussion" with company middle management about one of their lower management employees who was intentionally creating a hostile workplace and being disruptive to the project. Management's response was quite short and clear. "Proof does not matter. Regardless of who is responsible or what the problem is, whenever a contractor is involved the solution is always the same: get rid of the contractor. You're easy to replace. If you have a problem with this, there is the door. Now are you certain that you wish to file this complaint against one of our employees?"
This is why companies like to hire contractors to do their work while using employees to do management, because all solutions involve "get rid of the contractor". Even when contractors do have rights, which is rare, they almost never can afford the lawyer to defend themselves. And there's always another hungry contractor ready to jump in where the last one left off.
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