A group of YouTube Music staff found out that they had been made redundant while speaking at a council meeting in Texas, urging councillors to support them in their efforts to get the Google-owned company to negotiate with their union. Google says they were contractors whose agreements have expired
Supposedly they’re actually employees of some notorious contractor that YouTube hired.
These workers are for all intents and purposes clearly google employees, google just doesn’t want to pay them google wages… so they stick a different name on the door and spend a lot of time lecturing employees that they aren’t in fact google employees when the work they do all day every day is for google and under google’s direction.
Yes, that’s pretty standard for the industry. Everyone complains how gig economy jobs should be treated as employees, but the real scandal is contractors and H1B visas in tech labor.
It was sort of like this when I worked for Cisco, although they’d generally hire you officially after a little while. For me it only took around 6 months but for most of my coworkers it was around 3 years.
I mean… it is pretty awful and the conditions are bad and you have no hopes to ever change anything because you’re forbidden from ever contacting anyone from the parent company… but at least you’re an actual employee of the vendor
(the structure may be different for Cognizant, I can only talk from my experience)
🤮 🤮 🤮
Yep, it’s Cognizant, and they don’t have a particularly good reputation.
Still sucks for those workers, though.