Google thinks so highly of itself that it has announced that it will only consider doing business with contracting companies if they adhere to a list of unreasonable demands when it comes to employee treatment.
Under their new policies, outside contractors that want to do business with Google must offer their employees a minimum wage of $15, paid parental leave, and $5,000 per year for education.
More than half of the Google workforce doesn’t work full-time, with tens of thousands of contractors as well as temporary workers and vendors enlisted for tasks like software coding and serving food in its cafeterias.
Their top requirement is that workers be offered a comprehensive health care plan that covers not only the workers themselves but also their dependents and includes preventive and wellness services, prescription drugs, oral and vision care, counseling, and hospitalization, among other requirements. Suppliers have until 2022 to comply with this part of the requirement, but they must start paying workers a minimum of $15 per hour by January.
They must also offer workers a minimum sick leave of eight days, along with 12 weeks paid leave for birth as well as adoption. Meanwhile, the $5,000 per year in education must come in the form of tuition reimbursement for those who wish to take courses or learn new skills.
Google is known for offering pretty generous benefits to its employees that include free meals and snacks, 15 days of paid time off for first-year engineers that jumps to 25 days of paid time off after five years, and paid leave for new mothers of up to 22 weeks and seven to 12 weeks for fathers and adoptive parents.
Google wants us to think they genuinely care about people – but their actions say otherwise
While it’s nice that companies want to see employees treated well, not every firm has money flowing in from IPOs and the NSA that it can devote to such benefits. Lots of small companies simply can’t make those promises due to a lack of funding – and their situation won’t get any better when firms like Google pass them over for contracts. In fact, if the internet giant really did want to help workers across the board, they’d give greater consideration to those who are struggling to give their employees a better quality of life.
The move comes in the light of the company’s March 8th move to shorten the contracts of 34 temporary workers who were part of their Google Assistant personality team. The sudden move left them scrambling to find work and drew attention to the lack of safety nets involved in this type of work. On top of that, they did not allow full-time staff to offer these people any support. In response, more than 900 workers signed a letter that criticized Google’s policies.
Meanwhile, holier-than-thou Google secretly continues to take part in projects that employees have voiced ethical objections to, like Project Dragonfly, after claiming to have dropped the effort. The project involves a search platform that will blacklist information the Chinese government does not want its citizens to read about – topics like human rights and democracy, for starters – while covertly monitoring people and keeping track of their searches, even going so far as to link them to personal identifiers.
Google wants us to believe they truly care about people by instituting these new rules for contractor benefits, but if they are indeed so concerned about people’s well-being, why do they continue to work on evil projects like Dragonfly that enable the oppression of millions of Chinese people by their government?
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