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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

In situations where the work is not inherently temporary (e.g. a construction project) or seasonal, it seems to me that employing people as contractors without any job security is itself part of the problem.

That is on top of the sexual harassment and other mistreatment that the article discusses as well as the fact that the corps are cutting political deals to avoid paying taxes.

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Would you also insist that these companies hire and manage their own janitorial staff to clean the building every night? That work is neither temporary nor seasonal either, but no one thinks twice when every small and medium sized company contracts with a cleaning company.

I do insist that the companies should hire and manage their own janitorial staff, maintenance workers, mail room (so far as that still exists), food workers, etc.

A major part of American capitalism that worked was the fact that you could be poor, get a job at a company "at the bottom" and work your way up to the top. The transition to contracting out the bottom, and then an over-reliance on credentialism is a huge mistake.

That is a real interesting point, contracting out limits your ability to "work your way up," a big company. I am a huge proponent of mobility, especially inter-organizational mobility rather than intra-organizational mobility, but your point stands. Having the ability to move up in your organization and up outside of your organization gives the worker more choices and makes organizations actually work harder to do right by the worker. I think contracting out still can fit in this, but I am glad I read your point. It will be interesting to think through.

> That is a real interesting point, contracting out limits your ability to "work your way up," a big company.

Those times are gone. People don't stay at a company for 30 years and get a pension anymore.

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-long-should-an-employe...

"The median number of years that employees have worked for their current employer is currently 4.1 years, according to an Economic News Release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Certainly internal transfers have some advantages over external candidates, but I think most of those are shared by contractors who have been working internally.

I'm all for protecting workers, including contractors, but given the nature of modern business I'm not convinced "the company" is the right mechanism for that.

Also, keep in mind the average age of a company was 61 years, now it's 18.

https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...

I wasn't around back then, but I kinda doubt that it worked that way for most people (other than outliers like the flamin hot cheetos guy) or that it could work that way today.

my grandfather started out as a more or less unskilled factory worker. he worked his way up to factory superintendent over the years, and was overseeing several factories in a region by the end of his career. this is what I think of as a "started from the bottom" story, but it makes sense as a trajectory. he ended up near the top, but the problems he was solving were never that far from the factory floor.

now suppose you're a cafeteria worker at google. whether or not you're an official google employee doesn't seem to have much bearing on whether you eventually become an engineering manager; it's a totally disjoint skillset.

to me, it seems like contracting and credentialism are just side effects of a larger shift. true entry-level jobs (ie, a job without any prerequisite skills/knowledge) are simply rare. almost all the "entry-level" positions that do have a clear upward trajectory actually require the person to have some relevant skills that can't really be learned on the job in a reasonable amount of time.

Applying your grandfather’s story to the cafeteria worker example, a more apt parallel would be working their way up over the years to head of food service for the all the buildings at a site.

Similarly, a parallel for data center staff would be being able to take a job that has a path to roles in either management for data centers or a increasing scope towards sysadmin and devops/SRE roles.

How many jobs do you think are above the average food service worker in a cafe? Maybe 2. On site “manager”, regional, then executive.

For some family chain like Chili’s or Outback it be something like this. 100 employees per store -> 3 managers -> 1 General Manager (32 in my metro) -> Regional Manager (2 maybe 3 in my metro) -> South East VP (maybe 5 in the US) -> President (1) -> CEO (1). That’s 3200 or more people at the bottom in my metro trying to get the top jobs.

I think datacenter tech is a good example of one that should actually be in house, and not even for the sake of fairness. I imagine after a while these people must understand a lot about the company's infrastructure, albeit on a low level. it seems dumb for the company not to provide a path for advancement to these people. then again, I'm an application dev, so I don't know much about how all that works.

as for the food service example, I still don't see why it's particularly advantageous to be an official employee of the company. if the tech company does really well, you get to go along for the ride to an extent, but at the end of the day, you're still working in what the bean counters would consider a cost center. if you work for a food service contractor, you could potentially get into an important role in the profit center of that company. maybe one day you manage cafeterias for several large companies, not just one.

the root problem in this example is that food service just isn't very profitable. no matter how you slice it up, there's not a lot of extra money sloshing around to pay anyone.

But that janitor at Google would be much more able to take classes on the side, maybe seeing how these tech companies work. And then use his reliability and degree to leverage that into a job. Or if he doesn't work his way up, the extra stability of solid benefits and job instead of moving around contracts would possibly help them support their children to go on to becoming engineers at google. Working 60 hour weeks because you are contracting at a few different places makes it a lot harder to advance

This article went into detail about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...

I found it compelling, but I’m not sure what the solution is, given I don’t actually want to see companies doing things inefficiently, I just want the workers to be treated better and have more opportunities.

AMP link for those without sub: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upsh...

Contracting isn't inherently bad, but contracting jobs on short term temporary contracts with 2 year cliffs, regardless of performance, seems inherently cruel. Presumably they're doing it to avoid having long term employees, who might actually have rights.

Giving people job security - and with it the ability to plan your life and make long term decisions - is a nice thing to do. Google can afford to do it. They should.

Cleaning an office doesn't take 40 hours a week, so it makes more sense that a cleaning company hires full time people and contracts with multiple offices.

The alternative is each office hiring individuals for a few hours worth each week and dealing with high turnover rate because the cleaners would surely prefer other jobs with more hours than doing the administrative work of a cleaning company on top of the cleaning work for no extra pay.

I do actually think twice about companies doing that. If you contract out a job indefinitely then it’s just a workaround to prevent giving all the rights associated with being employed. I honestly think no job should be able to be contracted out of it lasts over a year

Big Tech aside, many companies do not have the staff or money to hire and manage certain jobs like cleaning, facilities, and physical security. You can’t just hire people and expect they are autonomous. Someone has to be managing and monitoring them.

On Big Tech’s scale the overhead would be huge. I have no doubts the other reason is giving them full benefits.

But hiring a third party who is making profit on top of cost of hiring and managing these jobs is something they can afford?

I can understand if you are a small business hiring a cleaner for like 8 hours a week. When these companies have multiple full time jobs worth of contracted labor done every week for years, I don't really believe them if the justification is that they can't "afford" to hire actual employees

A lot of times the janitorial staff are FTEs of the company that employs them.

And ultimately, in the cases where the office is leased, the cleaning company might have been hired by the owner of the office park.

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