signor_john - 1:46 am on Nov 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

In its third-quarter results, Google stated that it had 20,123 full-time employees as of September 30, 2008. A San Jose Mercury-News article from October 16 quoted Sergey Brin as saying that the company also has about 10,000 contractors, a number that he described as "really high." In the article, Brin indicated that Google started working on a plan to trim the number of contractors last spring "through vendor management, converting some contractors to regular employees, and other approaches."

While it's true that contractors are "workers," they aren't employees. Many are hired from third-party vendors for specific projects, for a finite period of time. Unless the author of the Webguild article can tell us how many of those "up to 10,000 workers" are employees and how many are contractors, it will be impossible to know what proportion of that unsubstantiated number represents layoffs and how much of it represents cutbacks in outsourcing of work to contractors who are employed by temp agencies. (And yes, there is a difference, though it may not be apparent to the employees or contractors who lose their paychecks.)