Comment on Google Flat-Out Refuses to Bargain With Workers, Prompting YouTube Music Strike

• Blooper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yes, I think that’s the reasonable argument Google’s lawyers and PR will use - but your example kind of demonstrates why that argument falls flat. The service DHL is providing to Amazon is logistics and shipping. This is an established, well-regulated industry all its own.

  Meanwhile, at Google, this contractor’s services are listed in the article:

  ensuring music content is available and approved for YouTube Music’s 80 million subscribers worldwide

  That sounds an awful lot like running the service to me. These employees perform key YouTube-specific work on an ongoing basis. For all intents and purposes, they work for Google, in Google’s offices, on Google’s systems, but their paycheck comes from Cognizant. The services being rendered aren’t on the level of “you make the widget and we’ll transport it to stores around the country because we’re a shipping company”. This is more like “we employ people for you, but provide a flimsy air gap so you don’t have to treat them like actual employees. We sell legally plausible deniability as a service.”

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  • nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    ensuring music content is available and approved for YouTube Music’s 80 million subscribers worldwide

    this could really mean anything from running the entire service to merely scraping lyrics

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    • Blooper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Absolutely fair. But as one of those IT dudes who used to be a contractor but now work for the same megacorp I was contracting for - I wouldn’t bet on it being super menial stuff. I love my job and my employer, but it’s very well understood that the agencies are essentially a cover for some fairly serious labor law violations.

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      • nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        according to Times, Cognizant workers in Dublin were previously contracted for verifying business listings in Google Maps. this is far from “running the service” I’m afraid

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• kool_newt@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  True, but is this maybe WHY Google uses subcontractors – to avoid direct responsibility and need to negotiate?

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  • SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, apparently working as a contractor apparently involves a middleman, a ‘pimp’, if you will, that brings nothing to the contractor, the person doing the labour, but instead just serves to make it easy for the company in need of services to skirt labor laws. Even unionized, what are you going to do, strike against the one with which you do the actual contracting by not attending the monthly check-ins with PimpCo and refusing to submit your timesheets?

    I wonder, however, shouldn’t not doing the work cause a breach of contract between the company requesting the service and the middleman and thus cost the middleman some valuable business?

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    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Your last paragraph is the actual value of a unionized strike as a subcontractor.
      If your employees strike, you can’t fulfill your business obligations, and so you get pressured by the people you have a contract with.

      The activity that skirts labor law is individual contractors, who are often indistinguishable from employees except for tax status and are much more often taken advantage of.

      A contracting company is just a company agreeing to do business with another, and doing so via it’s employees. It’s basically identical to a auto parts manufacturer selling parts to a car company. A Ford parts supplier is largely just a middleman for managing the production of parts to keep Ford from having to manage that process itself. Ford can’t renegotiate those employees contracts, even though their work is directly to a spec dictated by Ford.

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