It remains amazing to me how Google, which has received a huge amount of media coverage for being an awesome place to work, can simultaneously draw a line in the sand and say "people who do certain tasks aren't Googlers, and will be treated with the minimum amount of consideration required by law".

I've seen it rationalized all kinds of ways like "engineers are high value and hard to recruit, so they need big salaries and perks, but an HVAC technician at a datacentre doesn't" but it all falls apart when you consider that nearly all white collar professionals at Google get generous salaries, benefits and bonuses, even those in saturated fields like law, marketing or HR and a trade worker at a datacentre actually is directly working on Google's business.