Google reportedly shortened time up to $ 100 million in salary

What should an employer do if they find they have underpaid their workers by millions of dollars what is legally owed to them? If they had a conscience – or at least a fear of the consequences – they could confess everything and pay them back the amounts owed. Instead, Google shrugged its shoulders and dragged its feet to find a cure when it discovered it had likely bypassed some of its thousands of temporary overseas workers for years, according to the New York Times and the Guardian.

The Times reported on Friday that internal Google documents and emails reveal that “the gap in so-called benchmark rates between what Google paid full-time employees and temporary workers performing similar work had expanded significantly ”, potentially meaning the company was breaking the law in countries where similar pay levels are mandatory for similar positions. Google managers reportedly noticed the gap but did not act to increase pay rates from the 20-30% required to fix the problem, mainly for fear that a sudden adjustment would alert the press that something was wrong.

In summary, the Times wrote, Google may have underestimated workers in at least 16 countries with pay equity laws of around $ 100 million over nine years. The newspaper noted that the tally does not include fines it might face from regulators or the cost of legal proceedings that would result. Although there is no U.S. pay equity law, a whistleblower reported the issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2021, saying Google had failed to notify investors of a potentially costly risk.

According to a separate Guardian report, Google executives had known about the issue since at least May 2019.

The Times reported that although Google has been careful to pay temporary workers bonuses in some countries with equal pay laws to bring them closer to parity, Google executives have identified at least 16 others, including Brazil, Canada, Australia and Mexico where the tech giant has never bothered to identify or comply with equal pay laws. Google has also broken similar laws in the UK, according to the Guardian.

Google employs more than 150,000 temporary workers and entrepreneurs, and executives may have been particularly suspicious of the courtesy of numerous media reports that many of these workers are treated as second-class citizens within Google. The vast majority of them work for “salespeople” who manage outsourced tasks such as emotionally strenuous work to moderate content, wrote the Guardian. But thousands of temporary workers hired through recruitment agencies work at Google, reporting to Google officials. The Guardian wrote that they receive compensation amounting to around $ 800 million a year and work primarily in marketing, recruiting, and Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

What happened, the Guardian reported, is that Google has reviewed all of its temporary roles in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in 2012 and 2013, as well as Asia in 2017, to establish comparison pay rates that were sent to recruiting companies. Then no one bothered to update the rates. The Guardian reported that Adrienne Crowther, an executive whose portfolio included Google’s Extended Workforce team, appears to have noticed the gap on May 15, 2019. In the meantime, Google’s compensation for full time employees workers had increased in double digits percentages, which means the benchmark rates were way too low.

“Ouch! Sounds A LOT too old, ”Crowther reportedly said. wrote. Alan Barry, a Google compliance officer in Ireland, responded that he agreed and that Google should ‘refresh’ the data as part of a larger project regarding the future of temporary workers in the business.

Google then spent at least two years paying temporary workers based on the old pay scales., while behind the scenes the bigwigs of Google—who were presumably paid much more than the legal minimum–debated how to prevent it from tarnishing their reputation.

A solution concocted by the brain trust: apply the right rates for temporary workers newly hired in 2021 and after, and let the former temporary workers gradually disappear. According to the Guardian, Crowther, his fellow Google director, Deepak Negi, and his labor lawyers have endorsed the plan.

An October 2020 document, the Guardian wrote, touted the so-called “natural correction” plan because of the “current low risk of a parity claim, the ability to correct tariffs and not make much noise, and the ability to correct rates without immediate substantial financial impact for [Google’s departments]. “In an email obtained by The Times dated December 2020, Barry reportedly wrote that it would be better to increase the rates for all temps from a ‘compliance’ (i.e. law), but it could allow workers to “connect the dots.” This would put Google’s temporary contractors in a “difficult legal and ethical position,” with “significant” cost and “ wave of noise / frustration ”.

“I also don’t want to invite the accusation that we have allowed this situation to persist for so long that the required correction is significant,” Barry added, according to the Times, downplaying the situation somewhat.

In February 2021, Google executives had switched to a plan in which new temps would be hired on new pay scales, then backdating pay increases for existing temps. The plan made no provision for housing for workers who had already left Google, the Guardian wrote.

Additionally, The Times established that in some cases temporary jobs were paid at benchmark rates based on bundles of unrelated jobs, a Google official writing in an email he feared would reduce. artificially wages. Another email reviewed by the document showed that a Google official advised a colleague to set the rate of pay for a temporary position by comparing it to the “lowest common denominator” among full-time employees. Staff.

Google told The Times that it had already started adjusting pay rates, but also that many temporary workers were earning more than the amounts established by the benchmarks and / or had received increases during the period they failed to update them.

“Although the team did not increase the comparator reference rate for certain years, actual rates of pay for temporary staff have increased several times during this period, ”Spyro Karetsos, Google’s compliance officer, told The Guardian in a statement. “Most temporary workers are paid significantly more than benchmark rates. “

“Nevertheless, it is clear that this process was not managed in accordance with the high standards we hold as a company, ”added Karetsos.
“… Anyway, we’ll find out what went wrong here, and we’ll fix it.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but we’ll update when we hear.

[New York Times/Guardian]