Thousands of temporary tech workers have been thrown into a murky future with contracts expiring amid the coronavirus-led downturn

• White-collar tech workers on fixed-term contracts are facing an uncertain future amid the pandemic.
• Thousands will likely lose their jobs in the coming months as they reach the end of their contracts.
• These workers would normally likely find other work easily, but the economic downturn has plunged that into doubt.
• In March, 600-odd temps at Google were due to leave their roles, but the company introduced additional protections.
• Depending on tech firms' response to the pandemic, there may be increased demand for temps - but there's no way of knowing for sure yet.
• In the meantime, that means anxiety and uncertainty for tech workers watching the end of their contracts approach.

In mid-March, a Google contract worker raised a concern on an internal company message-board: It looked like 600-odd workers were about to lose their jobs over the next week because their contracts were expiring - in the middle of a pandemic and economic cratering.

After Business Insider reached out to Google for comment last month, the company informed workers that it was extending all fixed-length contracts by an extra two months if it was legally able to.

But the episode highlighted how the ongoing global outbreak of the novel coronavirus has placed some white-collar tech workers in a uniquely precarious position.

Silicon Valley has long made heavy use of contract staffers, in addition to its in-house workforce. At Google, for example, there are around 270,000 workers, more than half of whom are outsourced.

A subset of these workers are temporary workers, employed through third-party firms on a fixed-length contract. In a normal economy, these workers might reasonably expect their contracting firm to provide them with a new contract with a different company once their old contract expires - or else their in-demand technical skills could help them find another job in the fast-growing tech industry.

But the pandemic has turned this on its head. Once-buzzy startups are freezing hiring or making layoffs, flooding the work force with unemployed talent - and it's likely thousands of contract workers will be approaching a cliff in the weeks and months ahead as their contracts approach their predetermined end-dates.

There's a lack of data to quantify the impact

A key problem in trying to identify the extent of coronavirus' impact on white-collar temp workers is there's very little data available on how many of them there are exactly in the tech industry.

Data seen by Business Insider indicates there were more than 7,700 at Google alone as of mid-March, of which 600-odd were due to leave in the space of a week - indicating that there are almost certainly thousands across the entire industry who face losing their jobs in the months ahead. (Under normal circumstances, Google temps can work at the company for a maximum of two years at a time.) But beyond that, precision is difficult.

"[There] is almost no transparency around who they are and what their job quality is like," said Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity Collaborative, an inclusion-focused industry advocacy group. "There's a lot of attention paid to sub-contracted service workers, but the reason they're in the spotlight says as much about the fact they're organizable - there are unions who are trying to organise them, and they're a relatively concrete group of workers you can get your hands about. There's a lot of opacity around these temps and fixed-term workers."

There won't be headlines about these workers' departures like there would be with company layoffs, but the end result may be the same: Thousands of workers quietly losing their jobs and benefits in the middle of a financial crash and global public health crisis.

There could even be a boost in demand for temp workers - depending on companies' response to coronavirus

"We won't have an easy way of knowing if we have a cohort of people quietly let go because a contract ended, and there was a collectively sigh of relief [by a company] the money could be redirected elsewhere," said Mary Gray, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research and affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center.

But depending on tech companies' longer-term responses to coronavirus, we could also see a boom in demand for contract work. Companies often use contract workers to assist in building out more speculative or experimental projects and services, Gray said, as they're comparatively easy to scale and don't require reassigning already-occupied full-time employees.

If companies end up building significant new projects as a result of the pandemic, that pivot might fuel demand for contract workers, including those on short-term contracts. COVID-19 is already driving product development at some major companies, like Facebook's introduction of the Coronavirus Information Center as well as a raft of new features, and Google is utilizing user location data to aid public health workers track outbreaks.

Demand might increase in a similar way to certain service-focused roles, like delivery people, Gray said: "That's the hopeful picture, right. But that should also give us concern ... this is the moment we should ensure anyone doing that work should get support."

For now, it's simply too early to tell how the pandemic will impact temp workers in tech - and that means acute anxiety for the workers currently on those contracts, watching their end dates ticking ever closer.

Are you a contract tech worker? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (robaeprice@protonmail.com), standard email (rprice@businessinsider.com), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). Use a non-work device to reach out. We can keep sources anonymous. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

NOW WATCH: How social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic looks from a satellite