What should an employer do if he discovers that workers were paying millions of dollars for what was legally owed to them? If they were aware — or at least fearful of the consequences — they could confess and return the payment they owed. Instead, Google shrugged and dragged its feet on a remedy when it discovered it had probably gotten short of some of its thousands of temporary workers abroad for years, according to the New York News i the guardian.
The Times reported Friday that Google’s internal documents and emails reveal that the “gap in so-called reference rates between what Google paid full-time workers and temporary workers doing similar work had expanded significantly “, which meant the company was breaking the law in countries where similar pay levels are required for similar positions. Allegedly, Google Managers he noticed the discrepancy but it did not act to raise the wage rates between 20% and 30% required to solve the problem, mainly for fear that a sudden adjustment would alert the press that something was fleshless.
In short, the Times wrote, Google could have workers with reduced shifts in at least 16 countries with wage parity laws of about $ 100 million in nine years. The newspaper notes that the count does not include fines that regulators can meet or the cost of the resulting lawsuits. Although there is no US pay parity law, one complainant reported the issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2021, saying Google had not notified investors of a potentially costly risk.
According to one separately Guardian report, Google executives have been aware of the problem since at least May 2019.
The Times reported that while Google was responsible for paying bonuses on time in some countries with equal pay laws to bring them closer to parity, Google executives identified at least 16 others, including Brazil, Canada, Australia and Mexico, where the tech giant never bothered to identify or comply with equal pay laws. According to The Guardian, Google also fell into similar laws in the UK.
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Google uses more than 150,000 temporary workers and contractors, and executives may be especially cautious out of courtesy numerous media reports that many of these workers are treated as second-class citizens within Google. The vast majority work for “suppliers” who manage outsourced tasks such as work imposing emotionally to moderate the content, wrote The Guardian. But thousands of employees hired through staffing agencies work at Google, informing Google managers. The Guardian wrote that they received a payment in the amount of the neighborhood is $ 800 million a year and works heavily in marketing, contracting and Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Google’s Alphabet parent company.
What happened, The Guardian reported, was that Google reviewed all its temporary papers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in 2012 and 2013, as well as Asia in 2017, to establish comparative remuneration rates that were sent to staffing companies. Then no one bothered to update the rates. The Guardian reported that Adrienne Crowther, an executive whose portfolio included Google’s broad workforce team, appears to have noticed the discrepancy on May 15, 2019. Meanwhile, Google’s full-time compensation workers had increased by two digits percentages, which means the reference rates were too low.
“Wow! It looks MUCH too old, ”Crowther reported he 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 on the future of the company’s temporary workers.
Google spent at least two years paying time based on the old pay scales, all behind the scenes at GoogleWho they were presumably you pay much more than the legal minimum–they debated how to prevent it from tarnishing their reputation.
A solution prepared for brain confidence: apply the right rates for newly hired temporary workers in 2021 and beyond, and let the old times be phased out. According to The Guardian, Crowther, Google colleague Deepak Negi, and his labor lawyers signed the plan.
An October 2020 paper, The Guardian wrote, promoted the so-called “natural correction” plan because of the current low risk of a parity claim, the ability to correct rates and not make a lot of noise. and the ability of correct tariffs without immediate substantial financial impact a [Google’s departments]In an email obtained by the Times dated December 2020, Barry reportedly wrote that the rate hike for all time would be better from a “compliance perspective” (i.e., the law), but doing so could allow workers to “connect the dots.” This would put Google’s temporary contractors in a “difficult position, legally and ethically,” at a “significant” cost and “a rain of noise / frustration”.
“I am also not interested in inviting the charge that we have allowed this situation to persist for so long that the necessary correction is significant,” Barry added, according to the Times, which underestimated the situation.
By February 2021, Google executives had switched to a plan in which new times would be contracted according to the new salary scales, and then salary increases from existing times were reversed. The plan did not include any accommodation for workers who had already left Google, The Guardian wrote.
In addition, the Times established that in some cases, temporary jobs were paid at reference rates based on forced unrelated jobs, with a Google manager writing in an email that they feared would artificially reduce salaries. In another email that reviewed the document, it was shown that a Google manager advised a colleague to set the pay rate for a temporary function by comparing it to the “lowest common denominator “among full – time staff.
Google told the Times it has already begun adjusting payment rates, but so has that many of the seasons earned the amounts set by the reference rates and / or had received increases during the period of time in which it did not update them.
“Although the team has not increased the comparator rate benchmarks for some years, real salary rates for temporary staff they have increased numerous times in that period, “Google compliance officer Spyro Karetsos told The Guardian in a statement.” Most temporary staff are charged much more than comparative rates. “
“However, it is clear that this process has not been managed in accordance with the high standards to which we stand as a company, “Karetsos added.
“… In short, we will find out what went wrong here and we will do well.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for feedback from Gizmodo, but we will update when we listen again.
[New York Times/Guardian]