The Party’s Over: Organizing Across the Contractor Divide at Google
This chapter uses the post-2020 period at Google/Alphabet to explore the contested class dynamics at the company and in the wider field of tech work. Our approach uses the dividing line between in-house, directly employed workers (full-time employees, or FTEs) at Alphabet and the company's massive and mostly unacknowledged shadow workforce of temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs) as a crucial entry point to tell this story. The chapter points out that the line of separation generated by the practice of contracting out in tech is a fracture that is both constitutive to the class composition of tech work and a most promising site for labour organizing, scholarly research, and efforts to narrow the space between these two endeavours.
Image credit: Isobel Woodiwiss
