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

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Blooper@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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