Google rescinds offer to thousands of contract workers as advertising sinks.
Thousands of contract employees who had signed deals affected
Google, facing an advertising slump caused by the pandemic, has rescinded offers to several thousand people who had agreed to work at the company as temporary and contract workers.
“We’re slowing our pace of hiring and investment, and are not bringing on as many new starters as we had planned at the beginning of the year,” Google said in an email to contracting agencies last week. The company told the firms that it “will not be moving forward to onboard” the people that the agencies had recruited to work at Google.
The move affected more than 2,000 people globally who had signed offers with the agencies to be a contract or temp worker, according to three people familiar with the decision.
Google employs more than 130,000 contractors and temp workers, a shadow workforce that outnumbers its 123,000 full-time employees. Google’s full-time staff are rewarded with high salaries and generous perks, but temps and contractors often receive less pay, fewer benefits and do not have the same protections, even though they work alongside full timers.
The coronavirus crisis has underscored
that disparity. Google announced in April that it was extending its employee paid leave policy to 14 weeks from 8 weeks for caretakers, including parents looking after children whose schools are closed.
For employees working from home, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said Tuesday that they could spend $1,000 for equipment and furniture like standing desks and ergonomic chairs.
Many of the contract and temp candidates who had agreed to work at Google before the pandemic were
let go without any severance or financial compensation. This came after weeks of uncertainty as Google repeatedly postponed their start dates during which time they were not paid by Google or the staffing agencies.
Some of the would-be contractors left stable, fulltime jobs once they received an employment offer
at Google and are now searching for work in a difficult labor market. Some, who are Americans, said the rescinded offers have complicated and, in some cases, delayed their ability to receive unemployment benefits because they left their last jobs voluntarily, according to several of the workers facing this dilemma.