The story does not make sense to me either. Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved in a labor issue at company they contracted with and claiming are not google employees.
> "Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved "
.. and yet, it happened. I was there. Maybe you should look up "slave labor and clothing factories" or "janitorial service companies."
A modern company that contracts with another company to do something for them does not get to completely wash its hands of their practices. Up to a point, they do, but when the contractor egregiously violates the law, then they usually get involved anyway. Judges and juries and regulatory officials and employees take a very dim view of illegal conduct by your contractors. It reflects badly on you.
In this case, I don't know what happened afterwards, but I would guess that Google amended its contracts with those companies to better regulate cases like this. Just a guess.
Maybe they even intervened without mentioning my cousin's name -- maybe they just said "hey, in general, you can't violate labor laws, and you definitely can't refuse to pay people for being too slow!"
>A modern company that contracts with another company to do something for them does not get to completely wash its hands of their practices
They do if they want to maintain their position that the employees of the contracting firm are not their own employees.
If an employee is not getting paid by an employer, that is between the employee, the employer, and the state department of labor.
Slave labor and clothing factories are not relevant in this case as those operate in other countries where the government's labor laws and enforcement are much less effective than the US.
Janitorial service companies is what I am referring to. If my company hires a janitorial service company for $x to perform janitorial tasks, then the janitors are clearly not my company's employees. But if my company now starts getting involved in compensation disputes between the janitorial service company and its janitor employees, now my company is risking wading into a dispute in which it has no need to and risks raising questions about whose employees the janitors really are.
Perhaps what you said really did happen, but I cannot find the motivation for people in Google's HR department to do so, especially if it was in a state like California with a pretty decent labor department that would undoubtedly support workers who did not get paid for time worked.
> If an employee is not getting paid by an employer, that is between the employee, the employer, and the state department of labor.
In NL you can forget about that. It use to be that you could stick some "fictional" company between you and your employees and get out of jail free for everything, including salaries. Jobs 1-4 hours per week made it extra unlikely for any employee to run the extra mile after they were left without a name, address or phone number after about 3 months. Taking the bankrupt company to court was expensive and unlikely to work. People don't take a 2 hour job unless they need the money.
Now the obligation to pay salaries applies all the way up the food chain.
The way contracting usually work is that the contractor must submit timesheets daily or weekly to a supervisor at the parent company. The supervisor must approve the timesheet. The contractor will be paid the hours in the timesheet.
The story is a classic example where the manager (google employees) refused to acknowledge the hours for no valid reasons, preventing contractors from being paid.
Gotta escalate to HR to get paid and fill formal complaints against the bad manager.
That would be about compensation for the contracted firm itself though, which would make sense. I may have misunderstood the story as Google HR getting involved because the contracted firm did not pay an employee of the contracted firm.
The employer pays the contracting firm based on the timesheet, then the contracting firm pays the employee based on the timesheet/pay they were forwarded.
When there's a problem with the employee not being paid, the root cause often goes back to the employer blocking the pay in the first place.
I can only comment in the general case, I don't know your personal situation obviously.
Contractors cannot be at arms length. There has to be an arrangement with the employer (Google here) and the contracting firms to pay. That means there has to be a timesheet for each employee. Could be filled by either party.
You said your cousin wasn't paid because somebody (implying from Google Search) said she took too long and refused to pay her. To me that sounds like a normal story where Google had to approve the hours/pay and they didn't. The excuse from Google employees that they are detached is fishy at best, they wouldn't be able to prevent payment if they were.
> Google’s HR should surely know better than to get involved in a labor issue at company they contracted with and claiming are not google employees.
... as if it's better if they aren't involved? We are commenting on a story about that... seems like if they knew better, they would actually get involved to makes sure that this don't get out. The bare minimum is to pay the ones that complains, that way you at least minimize the risk of this getting out.
