Google's Second-Class Citizens 320
theodp writes "Valleywag reports on a new caste system at Google, which will mean compulsory lunch breaks, two additional unpaid 15-minute breaks, limited OT, and e-clock punching for those reclassified as hourly workers starting April 1. Could be worse, though. Google also offers gigs through WorkforceLogic (the company that helped Microsoft deal with its pesky permatemps), which come with a guarantee of unemployment after one year. Guess that's what passes for the Best Employer in the US these days."
After all (Score:0, Insightful)
Someone must work to compensate the 20% of time every employee can waste in preposterous projects.
Re:Crybabies (Score:3, Insightful)
So, in short to Google workers: STFU & GBTW!
Re:That's fed law. (Score:3, Insightful)
Happened here (Score:4, Insightful)
In general, I don't think it made much of a difference to people's salaries. Certain Help Desk staff had their schedules adjusted to prevent overtime. Hourly people had to record their times. What's strange is that there was a loss of prestige of sorts. Hourly employees weren't considered as "professional" as exempt employees. It wasn't major, and I don't think anyone mentions it now, but it was a cause of grumbling at the time.
my problem with the Google work environment ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, the free food, and fun corporate events are all nice and everything; but my sense is that in return you're pretty much expected to work extremely long hours, to make your job your life.
IMO, it's extremely important -- crucial even -- to have a separate work life and home life. Work hard from 9-to-5 but then drop everything and go home, spend the evening with your wife and family. Forget about work and come back fresh the next day. Google doesn't seem to emphasize that. It appears when you work at Google, you work there 24/7. I don't think that's necessarily a healthy approach.
Still -- looks like a very fun place to work. If you are allowed to go home at the end of the day.
boxlight
April fool's (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's fed law. (Score:2, Insightful)
But not paying people for their lunch breaks isn't a requirement of the law.
Re:Happened here (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a really interesting point. I think the loss of prestige is a major factor of grumbling. Although I cannot determine if being classified as hourly is the source of the issue or if the rank and file hourly archetype is to blame.
At every company I have ever worked for, the hourlies rarely took any initiative to change anything. There were always plenty of complaints from this group, but rarely were there any potential solutions offered.
Was this a side effect of being an hourly worker? Did they feel they had no leverage or voice to influence change? Did they feel that their job classification put their jobs on a precipice and rocking the boat might get them fired?
Does being classified as an hourly worker limit your growth potential in a company? That varies by company to company, but I can understand how the perception might be that it would. I can see discontentment arising out of having a ceiling thrown on your career ladder, even if that ceiling is just a perception.
Re:Starting date: April 1. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Remember when (Score:4, Insightful)
Why add an in-house service that you're obviously not good at when there are plenty of local janitorial service companies that you can contract out to and be more capable of at least telling whether or not the contracted company is doing a good or bad job at it?
Note, I do know that it's harder to tell on some things whether the contracted company is doing a good job without internal working knowledge. But janitation... pretty easy to tell that the toilets, bathrooms, carpets aren't being cleaned.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:2, Insightful)
Google, has catered Lunches and Dinners, hell probably even breakfasts and snacks whenever you wanted. All you have to do is walk to the Minimum, one per floor snack rooms for your choice of literally a hundred different, drinks and food stuffs.
Then there is the spend one hour a day doing what you enjoy for clearer or creative thinking later. And lets not forget the exercize balls and equipment, or the massage therapists on every floor.
The grumbling is probably coming from the fact that these perks are being waved in front of people who don't benefit from google's Philosophy but have to work next to it.
Re:Best Employer (Score:3, Insightful)
As a business, you're not just paying employees to do work. You're paying them (in the form of money, benefits, and culture) to do work for *you* instead of for your competitors.
It's about more than money. It's also a matter of respect. Tick off your workers enough, and they'll go to work for someone else.
Re:zeroth class is IPO zillionaires (Score:1, Insightful)
Google has some billionaires. You have many more people who are multi-millionaires. Some of them do the exact same job as the people going hourly - but they were hired pre-IPO. The Adwords worker who made a million dollars in stock options probably doesn't care so much about going hourly. Sure he might be annoyed and might leave the company, but he has his money. However, the new hire sitting next to him that's struggling to live on his $50K salary in Silicon Valley is probably going into depression.
I've been through this a few times. There is nothing quit like having a co-worker doing the same job as you who has collectively been paid 5000% of your compensation.
Re:I made more hourly... (Score:5, Insightful)
The ability to influence actual change is worth more than money to some. I know that I am more than willing to "lose" a few dollars an hour in order to be given free reign to implement my ideas on a large scale. If my ideas work I am in a much better position to be given more critical tasks and matching compensation.
Some companies don't give this freedom to hourlies.
I wish I could be hourly... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be so much more motivating to be paid by the hour. If the company wanted you to work long hours, they would have to pay extra for the privilege. The only tangible thing salaried employees get for working overtime is "maybe this will put you slightly higher on the list for raises next year, if there's money for raises at all".
It's a healthier attitude, I think. My employer would pay a fixed amount of money per unit of my time / effort. Of course, employers don't want that because they want you to donate a bunch of work to them, saving them some money. Of course, it never saves enough money to make your job safe from offshoring.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:3, Insightful)
Take for example this quote:
The real reason for this rule is to protect the employees. It is really intended for people like foundry employees. The law makes the lunch break manditory so that the company cannot force employees to work through lunch and not eat. By being mandatory the company cannot coerce the employees into claiming they skipped the lunch break by choice, when in fact management told them that they would be fired if they did not skip lunch.The breaks have a very similar reason. Now I admit that these laws seem broken. Google's hourly employees really have no risk ob being coerced into skipping lunch or breaks. It would be nice if Google would demonstrate that these changes are merely being made to comply with the law, by paying for lunch and the breaks. The fact that they are not is somewhat concerning.
Finally I will note that the requirement of receiving management approval for overtime does not seem to be for the protection of the worker. That one does exist only for the protection of profit.
FUD campaign on Google (Score:1, Insightful)
How is hourly being a second class citizen? (Score:3, Insightful)
I realize there is a generational difference in attitudes towards work; younger people expect to be given responsibility faster and have looser restrictions on when and how they work, provided they get the job done. Some people see that as spolied, and sometimes it may be, but it also represents a shift in the kinds of work many people do. If you can redefine how your job is done, I say more power to you.
That said, there are still jobs where a worker's output is largely a function of his having his ass in his seat for a certain amount of time. These people don't need to prepare briefs in time for a court deadline. They don't have jobs where interrupting them while they're in the grip of creative inspiration would be tantamount to a crime. They are paid to perform relatively routine operations repetitively.
Some might think having one of those jobs makes you second class. But having legal protection so the boss can't extort more work out of you can't hurt your status.
Re:I made more hourly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Many companies don't give the freedom to implement change to salaries; that requires a change request and management approval.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell...just take up smoking and you get at least 3-5 breaks a day of about 5 minutes.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:4, Insightful)
Working an 8 hour day, and getting paid extra for working long hours. and being limited on the number of hours you work (forcing a business to hire more people to handle the work load) is a GOOD thing.
Getting paid a set salary, then working tons of hours is labor abuse, in my mind. Because if you don't like it, your only choice is to complain and get fired for not being a "team player". happens all the time.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's exactly right - I've worked as tech support in a call centre where pretty much every second of your working day had to be accounted for. You had to "wrap up" and be available for the next call within 5 seconds (this includes writing up all the notes from the call in case the customer called back - which explains why people often have to explain their problem 10 times to different people), if you spent too long on toilet breaks or were more than 30 seconds late logging back on after lunch or when your shift started, all these things would be noted. There was a team responsible for monitoring everyone in the call centre to ensure they were all logged in and available to receive calls at all times - if anyone was not available this team would call up their team leader to go check it out.
The morale was terrible - everyone wanted out, even the team leaders and middle management. Every Thursday the local paper would carry the jobs section and at least 2 out of 3 people would have a copy at their desk. Staff retention was poor, and retention of the very skilled was even less, which led to awful service for the customers, but the company seemed to be in the business of answering large volumes of calls, not actually resolving issues.
Something as simple as a little flexibility in the workplace and being paid for breaks which the company doesn't have to pay you for can make a hell of a lot of difference. Productivity goes up, effectiveness increases, people remain with the company so the knowledge base and skill sharing increases. It doesn't take a lot to make your workforce largely happy, but similarly it doesn't take a lot to piss them all off - if companies focused a little more on this fact and a little less on the bottom line margins they'd probably find their profits would *shock* increase!
I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
So he was compensated, but choose not to buy health insurance. And now it's Microsoft's fault? When I do contracts I take how much health insurance costs into account. Because I could get hit by a bus and become paralyzed, health insurance isn't for sick people it's for everyone. It protect you in precisely these unexpected cases. You don't have to have the super expensive stuff that covers ever single doctors visit, that sort of insurance is very expensive. What you want is the insurance that covers the sudden costly operations and treatments. True the kind that covers major incidences won't cover the hundreds of dollars of prescription drugs every month, but when you consider that the basic insurance costs hundreds of dollars less than the full coverage stuff it doesn't seem like such a bad deal.
Ideally you choose insurance that if your appendix bursts or you have a mild heart attack you can still make your mortgage payments. If you have a stroke, get cancer, need an organ transplant or become paralyzed you should be able to afford your treatment and care, but you will have to make major changes to your lifestyle. And possibly sell your extra car, and if you can make money off it sell your house for a small condo closer to the hospital where you get treatment.
Personally I prefer working as a long-term contractor. State law here prohibits me from doing it for more than 18 months, but if it is a statement or work rather than a contract/temporary position then I can take it on indefinitely.
Perm is Dying (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best Employer (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of history's greatest men would not have their beliefs be entirely welcome today. Ford, at least, was simply a businessman.
Re:That's fed law. (Score:2, Insightful)
You could speak up and take your breaks and lunches, but then you look like a slacker when people see that you are not in your office, but everyone else is there. It's the same thing about working late in salaried jobs. People can put in the hours required and paid or they can put in endless hours so they are always seen busing their ass... because if you're the one NOT doing it when everyone else IS you're going to be paying for it in the long run when decisions about your future are made.
Re:Hoogle (Foaming & Spewing) (Score:4, Insightful)
The "recruiters" or "headhunters" lie to you, keep you running around for nothing, bring you in to their offices for nothing, don't read the resumes, and other really stupid stuff that you'd expect from a bunch of mindless coke fiends.
The industry now (high tech) is all about getting labor on the cheap and all about not giving workers any of the benefits that we took for granted during most of my working lifetime. Surftemps (Tempsurfs?) and H1B's are how the multibillionaire punks "get over" on the labor laws here in the US of A, as a "Temp" you can be let go because you have gas & you get no benefits. As a "guest worker" (H1B) not only can you be fired for clearing you throat during a meeting but you can be deported too!
I know why people from "developing" countries come here, money, something in short supply (back home). But why the hell do I see people from western Europe working here? Maybe I'm missing something?
Re:That's fed law. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm both salaried and get paid overtime - Canada (at least certain parts of it) is nice that way.