Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny benefits?
Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor labor laws, but this decision broke things.
"The rest of the world is wrong, only I know the truth in this thread on a random web forum" is an unpersuasive frame to be arguing from. Corporate legal departments may be inflexible and hidebound, but they surely know this stuff better than you do.
No, this is the way it works. If you do what MS did and offer unrestricted perks to your temps, they'll sue you and you'll lose. Period.
What you're arguing amounts to "no one should hire temporary labor to work alongside salaried employees". And, OK, that's a position. But if that's what you want then you should make that case and not argue that somehow Viscaino doesn't exist, because it does.
Which Microsoft would never have hired them, if that was the case, they would have hired normal FTEs.
So either 1) hire contractors and treat them as contractors (without the employee style treatment), or be sued later.
Microsoft didn’t lose the lawsuit, they won a settlement — and their lawyers and lobbyists made sure it would never happen again.
Most corporations have preferred vendors and the 50% plus savings in salary and benefits has a large kickback that finds its way back to the employer.
The real issue that was skirted around in the lawsuit was that Microsoft actually owned the vendors that supplied them with contractors.
No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.
Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all your other benefits not related to their job."
And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's universally enforced at every US employer large enough to have a legal department.
It is the same with undocumented workers. Would it better if they were deported than to be denied benefits afforded to citizens?
Yes, it would be better if they hired no-one. When your job conditions are beneath human dignity, you don't get to hire people for that job, even if that means your stock price doesn't grow quite as much and GDP is lower this year.
Realistically in the US the distinction is mainly about whether you have medical coverage. Plenty of people work with no or bad medical coverage because they are some combination of optimistic/greedy/desperate; to assess how humane that is you'd have to look at how they feel about it after getting diagnosed with something that they struggle to get decent treatment for because they weren't an employee.
I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was usually a mix of developing competency and department having budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal year.
The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a company switching treadmill.
If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.
This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp
Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary.
So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google.
Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent.
> If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google."
Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.