kool_newt comments on Google Flat-Out Refuses to Bargain With Workers, Prompting YouTube Music Strike

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

True, but is this maybe WHY Google uses subcontractors -- to avoid direct responsibility and need to negotiate?

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[–] SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Yeah, apparently working as a contractor apparently involves a middleman, a 'pimp', if you will, that brings nothing to the contractor, the person doing the labour, but instead just serves to make it easy for the company in need of services to skirt labor laws. Even unionized, what are you going to do, strike against the one with which you do the actual contracting by not attending the monthly check-ins with PimpCo and refusing to submit your timesheets?

I wonder, however, shouldn't not doing the work cause a breach of contract between the company requesting the service and the middleman and thus cost the middleman some valuable business?

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 years ago

Your last paragraph is the actual value of a unionized strike as a subcontractor.
If your employees strike, you can't fulfill your business obligations, and so you get pressured by the people you have a contract with.

The activity that skirts labor law is individual contractors, who are often indistinguishable from employees except for tax status and are much more often taken advantage of.

A contracting company is just a company agreeing to do business with another, and doing so via it's employees. It's basically identical to a auto parts manufacturer selling parts to a car company. A Ford parts supplier is largely just a middleman for managing the production of parts to keep Ford from having to manage that process itself. Ford can't renegotiate those employees contracts, even though their work is directly to a spec dictated by Ford.

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