Some Facebook contractors at Accenture and WiPro say they are not permitted to work from home; Facebook says it is due to safety, privacy, and legal reasons
Google is recommending *all* of its North American employees work from home due to #coronavirus concerns. Biggest company to do this so far. Parent company Alphabet has more than 100,000 employees most of whom work in the US. Rob Price / @robaeprice : Scoop: Google is now recommending all of its tens of thousands of North American employees work from home due to COVID-19. It's one of the biggest remote-work orders by any company to date. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Ellen K. Pao / @ekp : Kudos to Google for proactively offering paid sick leave to all employees, including temporary staff and vendors https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
As the pandemic forced tech's biggest offices shut, Google went furthest first, recommending all North American employees work remotely after earlier Seattle-area mandates at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. But the remote-work wave stopped at the boundary between full-time staff and the contract workforce that staffs content moderation and support operations.
The Intercept's reporting on Facebook contractors at Accenture and Wipro shows that divide in real time: while Google later extended remote work into 2021, the vendors running Facebook's outsourced operations kept their workers on-site, with Facebook citing safety, privacy, and legal reasons.
First-order effects
- Accenture and Wipro contractors doing Facebook work must keep commuting into offices during the outbreak, while the Facebook and Google employees they sit alongside are sent home.
Second-order effects
- The vendors are caught between their client's data-security restrictions and their workers' exposure risk, and any contractor who falls ill on-site creates liability and staffing gaps for both the outsourcer and Facebook.
Third-order effects
- If data-privacy justifications hold, the contingent workforce becomes structurally exempt from the remote-work era — a two-tier system in which the flexibility Google-style policies normalize accrues only to direct employees.
The trend: The shift to remote work is hardening a two-tier tech workforce, with privacy and security justifications keeping outsourced operations on-site while core employees stay home.