"Google contractors say a recruiting company has been systematically skimming their pay", 6 June 2022

A group of Google contractors says they’ve been underpaid by the agency that recruited them, resulting in thousands of dollars in unpaid wages per affected worker. The earliest reports occurred as long ago as 2019, and workers say the payroll errors are happening so regularly that they believe it to be a kind of systematic wage theft.

Guy Mylius, a contract employee in the Bay Area, found out about the issue four months into his job, when co-workers recommended he check his pay stub against the contractor’s work order. When he followed their advice, he discovered he’d been contracted for 50 percent more money than he’d been making...

Mylius and his colleagues were doing work for Google — producing help pages for the Google Help Center and other internal support tools — but they were employed through a series of nesting contract agencies. Google uses Accenture’s Flex program (among other contractors) to scale up for support content. Accenture contracts with a separate company called Artech to recruit and onboard suitable workers.

That system meant that Mylius and his colleagues were officially employed by Artech — even as they were working on Google products as part of teams run by Accenture. But workers say those nesting subcontractor arrangements opened the door for abuse. In theory, Accenture had set the pay rate for each role in a work order document before the hire was made. But many found that the rate on their pay stub was $5 to $10 lower than the specified rate...

In most cases, workers were either completely unaware of the underpayment or believed it to be an isolated incident. It was only when they started comparing experiences that they realized how common the underpayment really was....

...contractors make up a growing portion of the company’s workers, including programmers, graphic designers, human resource employees, and other jobs outside the core engineering teams. Because the workers are not officially Google employees, they’re often left out of the benefits available to official staffers.

...Artech says all employees were paid “in accordance with their employment agreements,” per an internal investigation of the complaint. “Accordingly, at this time Artech denies the allegations in their entirety,” says Artech general counsel Eric Szoke. “With respect to Artech’s contractual terms with its client, that is a confidential matter between Artech and Accenture.”

Shortly after Artech sent the statement, Mylius received his back pay in full from the company. No explanation was given for the timing of the repayment.

Reached for comment, Accenture says it was investigating the claims to ensure all employees were properly paid. “We are committed to ensuring our service providers are paying their people working for Accenture in alignment with our requirements,” Accenture representative Stacey Jones said in a statement. “We are looking into this matter.”...

... Google emphasized that its general business standards (including provisions around ethical standards and wages) also apply to subcontractors. “We take our supplier relations seriously, and they must adhere to Google’s Supplier Code of Conduct,” says Google representative Courtenay Mencini. “Our suppliers manage their employees and the terms of their employment directly, including wages. If a supplier decides to subcontract work through another company, our policies still apply.”

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