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Work who run day-to-day operations at Google's facilities are often contracted and paid just above California's minimum wage. (Christian Rasmussen, Flickr Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Google to increase diversity — by hiring security guards

Google's strategy to improve workforce diversity includes ending contracting for security guards, but the company's leadership remains largely white and male.

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Google, along with other profitable tech companies, has come under fire for the lack of diversity, especially among developers and engineers. So the company has a plan to increase workforce diversity by limiting contracting and putting nearly 200 employees directly on the payroll. However, the new positions are far from the tech side.

The company will now employ its own full and part-time security guards as an effort to include more Black and Latino workers among its ranks. Yet the majority of leaders and high-paid employees in the company are still white and male.

A recent study by Working Partnerships USA found that 72 percent of all janitors and 76 percent of grounds workers at tech companies identify as Black or Latino, as do 41 percent of all security guards. Because Black and Latino graduates earn less than 10 percent of all computer science degrees, the study recommended that tech companies start building a K-12 pipeline by hiring and paying kids’ parents decent wages. Contracted workers often go without benefits and are paid less than $15 per hour, while the majority of developers make more than $50 per hour.

Google has only ended contracting for security guards. Janitors, cooks and landscape workers, among others, are still hired through contractors.

On the tech side of things, 83 percent of Google’s workers are men and 3 percent are Black or Latino. Most Google tech employees (60 percent) are white, and 34 percent are Asian. When it comes to non-tech jobs — like administration, secretarial and human resources work, for example — the gender gap narrows, although the majority of workers (65 percent) are still white, 23 percent are Asian and 7 percent are Black or Latino.

 
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