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In 2019 a New York Times The report called Google’s assortment of 121,000 temporary workers “a ghost workforce that now exceeds the number of full-time employees in the company.”
Today, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claiming that the pay gap between temporary workers and full-time employees doing similar work has widened in recent years, extending enough so that the Guardian reports that he broke local laws in the UK, Europe and Asia. Worse yet, the documents consulted by the Guardian and the New York Times reveal that last December, Google officials discovered the problem and instead of fixing it immediately, they waited for action and only charged the correct rates for new hires of the year.
The whistleblower is represented by lawyers for Whistleblower Aid and has addressed the issue by claiming that Google has misled investors in the United States by failing to report legal and financial responsibilities it may face overseas. . Google did not respond to a request for comment from The edge, however in a statement reported by the TimesGoogle Compliance Officer Spyro Karetsos said: “It is clear that this process has not been managed to the high standards we hold as a company … We will find out what does didn’t work here, why it happened, and we’ll fix it.
Although the United States does not require companies to pay temporary workers at the same rates as full-time employees, the NOW reports that more than 30 countries have pay equity laws. The problem apparently arose because Google mapped comparable full-time job rates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in 2012 and 2013, and the Asia / Pacific region in 2017, but did not not updated these rates thereafter. .
This meant that recruiting agencies in the temporary positions were using stale data that did not match the increase in wages for full-time employees until compliance officers noticed the problem. The complaint says Google continued to pay the outdated rates while managers scrambled back and forth over what to do, and it claims the amount of back wages owed in more than 16 countries over the past nine years is ‘amounts to over $ 100 million.
It is not known if the SEC investigates, but if Google is investigated or fined, this problem could become even more costly. Even at those numbers, it shouldn’t be slowing down Google or its parent company Alphabet, which made $ 18.5 billion in profit in the second quarter of this year alone.
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