According to a union survey, Google subcontractors face low pay and inadequate benefits

Almost 2,000 workers who do a range of activities for the search engine giant's subcontractors spoke with Alphabet Workers Union.

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According to replies from nearly 2,000 employees in a study by the Alphabet Workers Union, employees at Google's subcontractors complain about receiving insufficient pay and benefits, having unstable employment, and having little control over working conditions.

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The results of the largest poll of US-based workers at 248 Google subcontractors, including Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Accenture Plc, and Appen Ltd., were revealed by the AWU on Wednesday. The jobs held by the workers questioned range greatly. They include raters, who evaluate the value of Google products like search results and ads, as well as members of the YouTube content operations team, writers for Google's help center, and even staff members who develop the AI algorithms used by Bard, the company's en vogue new AI chatbot. Two digital labor experts at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, examined the survey responses that the AWU claimed it distributed to roughly 26,000 workers and collected over the course of about six months.

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Parul Koul, a Google software engineer and the executive head of the AWU, claimed that the findings "show a lack of enforcement by Google of its own standards."

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In actuality, Koul added, "Google's minimum benefit criteria are little more than a blog post — not guarantees that every Google worker receives their fair share. We have the statistics to support this." No one working on a Google or Alphabet product should be unable to afford food, attend a doctor's visit, or take a sick day.

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The AWU, a minority union with no rights to collective bargaining, has escalated its efforts to draw attention to working conditions at Google by releasing the survey. The labor union held protests earlier this month on both US coasts to voice opposition to Google raters' "poverty wages and no benefits" and to show sympathy for thousands of recently laid-off coworkers. As dozens of employees filed for a union election in October, YouTube Music employees in Austin, Texas, also announced a walkout under the AWU banner in protest of a return-to-office requirement and purported union-busting.

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The AWU survey, according to Google, was "unrepresentative and misleading."

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According to a statement from Google spokesperson Chris Pappas, "We demand our US staffing partners and suppliers to provide an industry leading standard of compensation and benefits for their provided employees who access our corporate systems and campuses. We hold them responsible for meeting both those goals and our Supplier Code of Conduct, which we use as the basis for thorough audits.

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Some workers said they were paid less than Google's own minimum wage guidelines, which were made public. One employee, Jay Buchanan, claimed that when he began working for Google in 2016 as a search rater, he was upbeat about his hourly pay of $13.50. He began to think about renting a new house as soon as he started working full-time hours at his job. He just moved in with a disabled partner, and the employment suited their needs because she uses a wheelchair and Buchanan, who works from home, could assist her with simple tasks like climbing stairs.

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Buchanan claimed that he is currently in severe need of money. His compensation has increased to just $14 per hour in his seven years of employment with Google's subcontracted companies Leapforce Inc. and Appen, falling a dollar short of Google's minimum wage requirements.

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According to Buchanan, "the years have really worn down the pink tinge." Since I don't really have any other options, I'm continually questioning whether the employment was worthwhile as I saw the income stagnate as the cost of living slowly increased.

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Attempts to reach Appen for comment were unsuccessful. The Google representative, Pappas, stated that raters "work part-time from home" and "sometimes work for numerous organizations at a time," and that Google relies on its suppliers to oversee the raters' employment conditions, including salary and benefits.

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According to Koul, the study "clearly shows that Google must commit to hearing directly from employees to verify that these baseline criteria truly suit their needs. "Google must increase the bar for all employees so they may receive respectable benefits and compensation, in addition to enforcing its own standards for workers across job classifications."

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Employees highlighted a two-tiered system that regards subcontractors as second-class in survey responses and interviews, despite the fact that they labor full-time to develop Google goods and services. Sam Regan, a Cognizant employee working on content operations at YouTube, said, "Google has all this control, but very little culpability for us as contract workers." This position needs employees to manage copyright claims or add metadata tags to YouTube music videos.

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He claimed that Cognizant referred to Google as "the customer" as if it were an outside entity that was subject to change at any time. But in reality, we make use of Google resources and technologies. All day long, we work on Google goods," Regan remarked. "We provide Google privacy and security training. We have Google-issued emails. You don't work at Google, they remind us at the end of the day. They are one of your customers.

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A Cognizant spokesperson, Jeff DeMarrais, called the employees' decision to strike over the company's return-to-office policy "disappointing." Employees on this project "accepted employment with the idea that they were accepting in-office Cognizant positions and that the team would work together at a physical facility situated in Austin," according to the statement.

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According to DeMarrais, Cognizant hires, pays for training, and employs the workers. The only employer of these workers, he added, and not Google or YouTube, is Cognizant. "They may receive some ancillary training from our client so they can interface with a certain project's tools and processes," he said.

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According to Pappas, Google supported the Cognizant employees' right to decide whether or not to join a union. We have numerous contracts with both unionized and non-union vendors, so their choice won't have an impact on our business with Cognizant, he said. "Cognizant is accountable for these employees' employment terms as the employer,"

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According to Sarah Murphy, a writer for Google's help website at Accenture Flex, having a subcontracted company explain workers' benefits causes uncertainty about what is accessible. Murphy said that after working through an illness in the previous year, she was informed that she was not entitled to sick pay.

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In an interview, she remarked, "It was not fun to not know if I would get paid for a sick day or not. She and other employees were finally informed that they could take leave after bringing up Google's standards, which stipulate that subcontracted workers must have a minimum of eight sick days available to them. Murphy recalled the advice as being to "fight us tooth and nail and you'll get the right."

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Accenture stated that company would not comment on specific employee issues. According to a corporate spokesman, the company provides its employees with a full range of pay and benefits, including health insurance, paid time off, and access to a learning platform designed to develop employees' careers. The spokeswoman added in a statement that workers are periodically informed about all of these perks.

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Yet, the AWU's research revealed that almost half of the subcontracted workers surveyed were either unaware of paid sick days or did not have access to them. According to 72% of respondents, paid parental leave was unavailable to them. Just 10% of respondents said they have access to student loan repayment. The findings of the AWU show that 65% of respondents were non-white.

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The poll revealed that there are sizable ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation wage gaps even among the group of subcontracted workers. According to the poll, LGBTQ employees make on average 15% less than their heterosexual peers, while black and hispanic workers made 20% less than their white counterparts. The average wage difference between disabled vendors and their able-bodied peers is 18%.

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According to Veronique Emond-Sioufi, a researcher at Simon Fraser University who assisted in the analysis of the findings, the AWU's findings corroborated workers' perceptions of a "hierarchy in labor where certain people make less, through particular structural means."

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She claimed that the study demonstrated "how this kind of labor is underestimated and devalued. It's the downward spiral race. Everyone will be dragged down wherever the floor is.

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