The company also delayed salary corrections for two years, the company wrote Guard. Google has known since 2019 that it is not complying with the law in many countries, but it would be too expensive to just raise wages. According to The Guardian, the company also fears negative attention from the media.

Local legislation in countries such as the UK requires companies to pay their flexible workers the same amount per hour as their permanent workers, provided they do the same work. More than 100,000 flexible and temporary workers work for Google, doing jobs such as content moderation.

Thousands of these temporary workers work through a system where they are paid by a temporary employment agency, but managed by Google managers. For example, employees in marketing or recruiters. In the Netherlands, there are around 44 people working for Google through the construction.

Flexible workers should be paid the same

More than 30 countries have laws that require companies to pay flexible workers the same as regular workers doing the same job. The employee must also, for example, receive the same number of vacation days.

Google is said to have determined internally in 2013 what the ‘comparable salaries’ actually were for all the different temporary positions. Since then, salaries for Google’s full-time employees have increased significantly, but the company failed to recalculate “comparable salaries” for all positions.

$17.3 million

According to an internal Google analysis seen by The Guardian, this saved a total of around 17.3 million dollars (14.6 million euros) for employees in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. However, this analysis only includes new hires and not salary increases for temporary employees who have worked at Google for longer periods of time.

Flexible workers will lose between 12 and 50 percent of their wages this way. Even though Google learned in 2019 that salaries had not been adjusted since 2013, the company deliberately delayed resolving the issue. Instead, the company reportedly held extensive internal discussions about the best approach that would generate little media attention.

Not solved yet

A year ago, the company made a plan to increase the salaries of new flexible workers and thus gradually solve the problem. The company then explored a number of other options, including retroactively applying salary increases to temporary employees who had worked at the company for a longer period of time.

So far, Google has not resolved the issue, according to The Guardian. Google told the newspaper that they did make this error and the matter is now being investigated internally.