I mean classic example are contracting out food service in the corporate cafeteria. You contract the work to some random other company who hire people to do food service or do you want Google or whoever to start hiring cooks themselves? Janitorial staff is also a classic role for this style of employment.
That's quite different - Google contracts for a service to be provided and takes no interest in managing janitors and cooks individually. The red badgers sound like they're being given individual instructions but denied employee protection.
Two different kind of outsourcing contracts. And red badgers, unless they are freelancers, have employee protection. Just not from Google, or any other company using subcontracting agencies for that matter.
but looking at it from a top down perspective, it does seem like google treats these contractors no better than the janitors and cooks. So i dont think you can say it's different merely because the nature of the work is not the same.
The difference between a legitimate third party service and these ought-to-be-illegal body shop arrangements is whether Google is paying for a specific service—e.g. clean offices—or people that they boss around.
Google managed to hire their first chef in 1999 and manage them directly, I'm sure they can manage a global team of cooks better than anyone else if they wanted to, because of their specific needs and so many global offices to spread the gains through. It's all just a decision they took.
Google has infinite money and doesn't have to care about things like that. They can waste money on food just like they waste it hiring 10000 engineers who don't do any work.
