I'm paid 24 million yen per hour, but more than half of the employees are contract employees, isn't it abnormal?
... and 10 US Senators surround Google. We sent an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting that contract employees who have been working for more than six months be immediately promoted to full-time employees. Sender: Sherrod Brown, Patty Murray, Benjamin Cardin, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Edward Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Richard Durbin, Bernie Sanders.
Regular and non-regular in name only
This is how Googlers are currently structured.
102,000 contract employees
121,000 full-time employees
The New York Times, May 2019
The annual salary is about this.
Contract employee $90,000
Full-time employee $128,000 (approximately 13.6 million yen)
According to Recode, May 2019
I understand if it's a sub-business that is outside the core business, but it doesn't seem to be the case... Lawmakers are annoyed that the work is "almost the same, the only difference is the name."
In some cases, Google decides where to work, working hours, work content, and whether or not to renew contracts, and it is common for temporary employees to work side by side with regular employees on long-term projects for years. And working for much lower wages has become the norm.
Google has a market cap of over $100 billion and you made over $400 million last year. I don't understand why temporary and contract workers should be treated so unfairly.
[...]Even if the contract temp agency says they keep the minimum wage of $15 an hour, they have health insurance, and they have childcare leave, the treatment is much lower than that of a full-time employee, so what is it? It's no use saying that.
- from public questionnaire
Pichai, a man with an hourly wage of 24 million yen, has to answer by Friday.
Important anxiety about being a non-regular employee
Although the difference in treatment is severe, the most difficult thing is always being side by side with the anxiety of being fired. In March of this year, 80% of the 48 members of the personality team were suddenly notified that they had been fired within a month, and about 900 people signed a campaign demanding better treatment. At that time, it was a collective dismissal with a conference call that didn't even call one person, and all the regular employees who didn't get fired were silent and didn't talk. The reason is that just saying "thank you for everything" and "let me know if you have any problems" will become the company's liability. At Google, which has become a legal savvy, it is no longer possible to speak as a matter of course as a human being. It's not the time to get scared with just one t-shirt.
At Google, we keep saying that no matter how excellent non-regular and temporary employees are, they can never be promoted to regular employment. This is well-known as an in-house caste, but in this letter of inquiry, we are also asking for the abolition of the system where temporary staffing companies charge a "conversion fee" if they become a full-time employee by mistake. "Thank you for introducing me to a good person"... isn't it?
