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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

HR is always involved with external contractors.

The way contracting usually work is that the contractor must submit timesheets daily or weekly to a supervisor at the parent company. The supervisor must approve the timesheet. The contractor will be paid the hours in the timesheet.

The story is a classic example where the manager (google employees) refused to acknowledge the hours for no valid reasons, preventing contractors from being paid.

Gotta escalate to HR to get paid and fill formal complaints against the bad manager.

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That would be about compensation for the contracted firm itself though, which would make sense. I may have misunderstood the story as Google HR getting involved because the contracted firm did not pay an employee of the contracted firm.

The employer pays the contracting firm based on the timesheet, then the contracting firm pays the employee based on the timesheet/pay they were forwarded.

When there's a problem with the employee not being paid, the root cause often goes back to the employer blocking the pay in the first place.

No, not what happened. The contracting firm was officially "arms' length" from Google and no Google employees even knew my cousin's name.

However, it turns out that "arms' length" doesn't mean the contractor can get away with absolutely anything.

I can only comment in the general case, I don't know your personal situation obviously.

Contractors cannot be at arms length. There has to be an arrangement with the employer (Google here) and the contracting firms to pay. That means there has to be a timesheet for each employee. Could be filled by either party.

You said your cousin wasn't paid because somebody (implying from Google Search) said she took too long and refused to pay her. To me that sounds like a normal story where Google had to approve the hours/pay and they didn't. The excuse from Google employees that they are detached is fishy at best, they wouldn't be able to prevent payment if they were.

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