After a year of having to monitor bestiality, decapitations and child pornography, a Google worker claims he was left completely traumatised. But rather than helping him out, Google decided that since he was a contractor he should be fired instead and can live with the nightmares.
The unnamed employee's job was to monitor the internet for images and websites which should not be on the Google search because they are too horrific.
He told Buzzfeed that his job involved spending hours and hours looking at horrible content, such as beheadings, child pornography (up to 15,000 images a day), gore, and extreme fetishes.
Google got someone from a federal agency to talk to him, he said, and that was when he realised he needed therapy.
The agent showed photos of seemingly innocuous activities and asked him for his first visceral reaction. There was a picture of a father and a child and he thought there was something wrong.
Google apparently outsources this work to contractors who are only kept for a year. If they stay any longer they become full time workers so the search engine just fires them.
The contract said his section was like the "fight club" at Google as no one talked about it.
There was one guy who was an expert on beheading and every time a new video by Al Qaeda came up, he was the first guy to see it. When it was time for him to go, his manager had to ask the rest of the department what he did.
If you're a contractor, you're just a name and a department at Google, he said.
First, the issue of Google firing contractors after a year, to they don't become full-time staff. Fair? Presumably when he took the job he knew it was only going to be for a year, so, yes, it's fair. Full-time jobs at Google are much sought-after and very hard to get. Presumably contract positions are easier to get. There's no obligation for Google to let this perhaps less-qualified worker in by the side door.
Where did this provision for transitioning to permanent status after a year come from? Presumably it's a government requirement. Is THAT fair?
But secondly, does Google have obligations to workers whose mental health suffers from the nature their work, in this case, viewing extreme pornography and similar disturbing images? Maybe. It would depend on a realistic assessment of what risks of this kind of work really are. I don't take every claim of harm at face value, and after all people are allowed to quit (or not take) jobs they find distressing. It might make sense for Google to monitor the psychological health of people in these kinds of jobs.
Thirdly, there is the issue of companies giving second-class (more reallistically: tenth-class) treatment to contract workers. While one doesn't expect them to have all benefits of full-time workers, they should be treated as people, not just resources.