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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

It also allows the company to talk about how "all of its employees" get X, Y, and Z, without bearing the costs of providing those perks to everyone who works for them.

Imagine if Google had to provide their legendary perks to all of their 'contractors'... The scale of buildout that would be required.

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At least some contractors get some of the perks. I've seen kitchen workers, security, maintenance workers eating in the cafes. This article says bus drivers have access to the cafes and gym:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bus-drivers-work-long-...

If all the contractors became employees the diversity numbers would improve. But the pay rate correlation to minorities would decline.

There's only so much that companies can do to provide non-salary compensation (like perks) to contractors and vendors without getting in trouble legally. Blame 80's Microsoft for screwing things up for everybody by abusing their contractors.

My inclination was less that tech companies should abuse their contractors, but that tech companies should actually directly employ people that pretty much solely work for them.

Not implying at all that tech companies are deliberately abusing their contractors. My point was that because Microsoft did do so back in the 80's (and got slammed by the courts for it), now everybody is scared to even appear to treat contractors the same as FTEs.

I don't know all the ins and outs of FTE vs contractor vs vendor (I'm a geek, not an HR person), but presumably there are business reasons for choosing one over the other. "One's cheaper" is an obvious one, but there are probably others (taxes? liability? who knows. me write code).

There are definitely cases where job functions at major tech companies have been converted from vendor/contractor to FTE (Google physical security officers is one I personally know of. Presumably there are others).

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