Google underpaid thousands of contract workers across dozens of countries: Report

Google underpaid thousands of international temporary workers, violating pay-parity laws in several nations, The New York Times and The Guardian revealed on Friday, September 10. According to the reports, the tech giant’s compliance department found ​​Google had been underpaying staff in UK, Europe and Asia since May 2019, but chose not to immediately compensate the underpaid contract workers. Instead, they only corrected rates for new employees in the hopes of avoiding legal, financial and reputational damage. 

NYT reported that Alan Barry, a Google manager based in Ireland, feared that the dramatic pay increase would cause employees to “connect the dots” and “give rise to a flurry of noise/frustration”. In internal emails reviewed by the media outlet, Barry said that he was also not keen to invite the charge that the firm allowed this situation to persist for so long that the correction required is significant. It is worth mentioning that pay-parity laws in Europe and Asia require firms to pay equitable wages to full-time and temporary workers who perform similar workplace duties. 

Google to conduct review of its compliance practices 

Following the report, Google admitted to the failures and said that it would conduct an investigation. According to The Guardian, Google's chief compliance officer, Spyro Karetsos, said that while the team hasn’t increased the comparator rate benchmarks for some years, actual pay rates for temporary workers have increased numerous times in that period. Spyro added that most contract workers are paid “significantly more” than the comparator rate. However, he added that it is now clear that this process has “not been handled consistently with the high standards to which we hold ourselves as a company”. 

Spyro added that the firm is doing a thorough review and is committed to identifying and addressing any pay discrepancies that the team has not already addressed. He said that Google will be conducting a review of its compliance practices in this area. Spyro went on to explain that in short, the firm is “going to figure out” what went wrong, why it happened and it is then going to make it right. 

It is worth noting that Google employs over 900 contract workers throughout the UK, Ireland, India, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Poland. All the aforementioned countries enforce local pay-parity laws, a protocol that does not exist in the United States. According to reports, Google’s temporary and contract workers outnumber its force of full-time employees, creating a "shadow workforce". Following the reports, the issue has now been flagged to the SEC. 

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