• jtrek@startrek.website
    14·
    2 days ago

    The place I work (a multinational company but not one you’ve probably heard of) has been hiring almost exclusively “contractors” for a while.

    They hire someone to be a software developer or qualify assurance engineer or whatever, but via a third party staffing company. Then that person acts exactly like a full time employee - goes to meetings, does work, reports to a boss - except they don’t get the same benefits as full timers.

    This seems like it shouldn’t be legal, but most people are too worried about losing their job to push much about it.

    • vrek@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Depends on how bad it is for, I got hired once with a 6 month temp to perm contract. Between 5.5 and 6.5 months you got called into the boss’s office and either given an offer letter or were let go. No extensions no re-signing. Not the best but not horrible. Later it was changed to up to 3 years of contractor at which point you needed to be “let go” for 6 weeks and then maybe be offered another contract. That’s some bullshit.

    • Nils@lemmy.ca
      2·
      2 days ago

      That is why Deloitte, PwC, Tata, … and the list goes on, exists. They were the gig economy before the likes of uber, door dash…

      I worked for a multinational a long time ago and learned 2 important things:

      • Some countries have strong labour laws, and a judiciary that bites. The company was sued and had to compensate those contractors similar to employees, including severance packages for people that were dismissed.
      • One of the main unions (some unions cover a sector of the industry in a country rather than a single company) brought up terms related to contractors, to ensure they would have similar benefits, and they manage to get a few in during the collective agreement, sadly it only affected people in that region. It was ridiculous, some RH firms were paying people 10% of what they were billing us. It was cheaper to hire them straight, but for silly reasons we were not allowed to.
      • jtrek@startrek.website
        3·
        2 days ago

        I’m really not sure why they don’t just hire the contractors full time, since they’re keeping them for years anyway. The staffing company is taking a cut, and that can’t be that much cheaper than just giving regular benefits.

        It probably works out via cruel economics to do it this way, somehow.