Google issues new ‘minimum standards’ for temps after more than 900 employees sign letter criticizing abrupt firing

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

More than 900 Google workers have signed a letter objecting to the tech giant’s treatment of temporary contractors, in what organizers are calling a “historical coalition” between Google’s full-time employees (FTEs) and temps, vendors and contractors (TVCs).

In March, Google abruptly shortened the contracts of 34 temp workers on the “personality” team for Google Assistant – the Alexa-like digital assistant that reads you the weather, manages your calendar, sends a text message, or calls you an Uber through your phone or smart speaker.

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The cuts, which affected contractors around the globe, reinvigorated the debate over Google’s extensive use of TVCs, amid a growing labor movement within the company. In recent months, Google FTEs and TVCs have been increasingly vocal in protesting both their working conditions and the ethics of their employer.

“For years, Google has boasted of its ability to scale up and down very quickly, and [sic] vocal in its ability to ‘navigate changes with agility’,” the letter reads. “A whole team thrown into financial uncertainty is what scaling down quickly looks like for Google workers. This is the human cost of agility.”

The TVCs on the personality team describe themselves in the 27 March letter as “the human labor that makes the Assistant relevant, funny, and relatable in more than 50 languages”. They are responsible for coming up with the Assistant’s not-too-groan-inducing jokes as well as the tone and content of more serious questions.

If you ask the Assistant if it is a ghost, it will respond, “Boo!” If you ask it “Who made you?” it says: “I was made by a team of people at Google.”

TVCs make up 54% of Google’s global workforce, and more than half of the people on the personality team, according to the letter. The TVCs on the personality team sit alongside Google FTEs in offices around the world, but they are employed by a staffing agency on contracts ranging from two to six months at a time.

A whole team thrown into financial uncertainty … This is the human cost of agility Google employee letter

On 8 March, about 80% of the TVCs on the team – 34 people – were informed that their contracts were ending ahead of schedule, either on 5 April or, in a few cases, on 31 July, according to the letter.

The layoffs took place around the globe, starting in Seoul, and hitting London just as TVCs in New York were heading to work.

“During the process, our managers and the full-time workers on our team were silent,” the letter states. “Google told them that offering support or even thanking us for years of work would make the company legally liable. Our teammates were told to distance themselves from us at the moment when we were most in need – just so that Google could avoid legal responsibility.”

A spokeswoman for Google noted that temporary workers were allowed to apply for full-time jobs, had received a minimum of four weeks’ notice, and could potentially receive another assignment from their staffing agency.

“Temporary workers join our workforce when we need to ramp up quickly for projects,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “When particular projects mature, we work to transition temp and vendor roles to regular full-time employee roles.”

The spokeswoman declined to provide information about what, if any, transition assistance it was providing.

One of the fired TVCs, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she had learned of the cuts from a colleague in London, but did not get the official word for many hours.

“By the time I got the news at 4.30pm, I was already in agony and very stressed”, she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Full-time and temporary workers at Google have been increasingly vocal in protesting their working conditions. Photograph: Peter Power/Reuters

“The moment you say you work for Google, people think you are rich,” she added. “They don’t know that I don’t even have insurance.”

Rachel Miller, another of the TVCs on the team, who was not fired as her contract was already scheduled to end on 26 March, was working remotely that day but experienced the Googlers’ silence in the team’s chat room.

“It was just really eerie and sinister,” she said. “You would see them pop up and see what was written … We knew they were there.” Miller stressed that she did not blame the Google employees but rather the management for creating the two-tier system.

A 32-year-old writer from Brooklyn, Miller said that she and the other TVCs on the team were inspired to protest against their treatment by Google by recent worker organizing in digital media.

“We read about how folks at Buzzfeed rallied to get vacation payment and sick days for people laid off,” she said. “We don’t have sick days and vacations, so there’s not much we can ask for except for asking for our contracts to be respected.”

That desire for respect defines the letter’s three demands. The TVCs asked Google to “respect our contracts” by paying out the remaining length of contracts for those whose terms were shortened; “respect our humanity” by allowing FTEs to “openly empathize” with fired TVCs; and “respect our work” by converting TVCs to full-time status.

After the letter began circulating inside Google on 27 March, a Google manager did respond to the second demand, telling Google FTEs in an email, “I know many of you work with our temps and it’s important that you feel able to express your compassion for them, so please do.”

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“That’s a win,” said Miller of the email from management. “It’s not a policy change. But it’s a win.

“The fight isn’t contract workers against full-time workers, the fight is workers against the company. We’re all unfairly treated if one of us is.”

After publication of this article, Google announced to TVCs and FTEs by email that it would be implementing new “minimum standards” for temps and vendors in the United States.

In the coming years, Google will require staffing agencies and suppliers to provide US-based employees who work at least 33 hours a week for Google with:

A minimum wage of $15 an hour

Comprehensive health insurance

A minimum of eight paid sick days

12 weeks of paid parental leave

$5,000 per year in tuition reimbursement for skills training and higher education

“While most of our partner companies do the right thing, we want to hold them and ourselves to a high standard,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice-president for people operations, in an email announcing the changes to staff.

While the current changes are limited to the US, the company will plan to “identify and address areas of potential improvement in other areas of the world” in the future, Naughton wrote.

The minimum wage requirement will go into effect on 1 January 2020, while the other benefits will not be required until 1 January 2022. Facebook implemented a $15-an-hour minimum wage for contractors and vendors, as well as 15 days of paid time off, in May 2015.

“We wish it was as easy as flipping a switch and turning this on tomorrow,” wrote Adrienne Crowther, Google’s director of extended workforce solutions in a separate email to TVCs. “We ask for your patience through implementation.”

A Google spokeswoman said that the changes had been “in the works for a while” and that the company expected most suppliers to be in compliance with the new standards by 2020.

One of the fired Google Assistant personality TVCs responded to the announcement with some disappointment, noting that it did not change their situation:

“Google didn’t mention anything regarding the three demands we asked for,” she said. “This change means nothing to us.”