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Weekly UpdatesFortune does the unemployed reader a disservice with this bold headline, "Now hiring! How to Land a Top Job." Or maybe not; we're in a bad recession. Throughout the issue, in fact, Fortune provides tips for the job seeker on how to land a position with these companies, though several were facing layoffs. One hundred Google recruiters were laid off the week before this year's list came out, and by the time the Best Companies issue hit newsstands, engineers were losing their jobs, too. Starbucks was expecting to lay off about 6,700 employees. More companies on the list, like Microsoft, will lay off thousands of workers in the coming months, while employees at other companies endure uncertainty. Genentech, for one, may be facing a hostile takeover.
Fortune's descriptions of life at Google and other high-tech firms on this list are misleading. Google outsources about a third of its labor to freelance contractors who have no access to these groovy benefits. In fact, inequality within tech companies like Google is increasing, says Marcus Courtney, head of the telecom department for UNI Global Union, an international labor federation. Fewer and fewer employees enjoy the idyllic conditions portrayed here. Contractors, Courtney says, "don't even have health insurance, much less afternoon tea!" Overseas, it's worse. At a China keyboard factory serving Microsoft and others, some two thousand young women work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and are not allowed to talk or even raise their heads on the assembly line.
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After five years, a clerk at Costco makes much more than this ($46,600), yet Costco is not on this list. It's curious that Wegmans has remained on it for more than a decade. Unionized grocery workers pay much less for their health insurance than Wegmans's employees, and, unlike at Wegmans, their hours are guaranteed. We love yoga, too, but it's no substitute for lower-cost health care and job security. The Best Companies list doesn't care much about boring issues like compensation. In a letter to a former Starbucks employee who took issue with the list's exaggerations, Best Companies Team Manager Katie Popp wrote, "While we do consider (somewhat) salaries, benefits, and perks as part of the list selection process, the focus of our evaluation of companies lies not in tangibles but in trust in the workplace."
Far be it from us to quibble about a massage, but these are subsidized, not flee. It's not the first time Fortune has exaggerated Google's perks: last year, the magazine claimed that the company had "onsite" child care, when in fact it's a few miles away. A small point, but errors on this list seem, often, to favor the companies. The entry on Starbucks, for instance, lists the salary of the most common hourly job as $42,387. Since the most common hourly position at the company is barista--the person who makes your coffee--and these folks make between $7 and $11 an hour, where did this figure come from? The answer lies in a mistake that the listmakers acknowledged in correspondence but never corrected in the magazine: the Best Companies salary data covers only "full-time" employees, although Fortune says the survey includes part-timers.
The list is compiled not by Fortune's journalists and researchers, as readers likely assume, but by a San Francisco firm called the Great Place to Work[R] Institute, which also offers paid consulting services to corporations on how to become a Great Place to Work[R]. It's not much of a competition to get on the list, either: out of 353 companies that applied to be one of the Best Companies this year, one hundred made the list. At best a hybrid of journalism and PR, the list uncritically presents companies' own mythologies about themselves as fact. The Starbucks's entry, for instance, says the company is great for "part-timers," yet Starbucks part-timers across the land are grumbling about a new policy with an Orwellian name, "Optimal Scheduling," in which many employees must make themselves available for the entire work week, without being guaranteed a single hour of work in return. This, employees say, will make working at Starbucks untenable for students, parents, or anyone who has a second job.
Fortune consistently allows the companies to define the word "employee" as they prefer--excluding the people at the lowest end of the supply chain. For more than a decade, Whole Foods has been criticized by the United Farm Workers and many other groups for refusing to require decent conditions for workers tending the cattle and picking the vegetables that supply its stores.
LIZA FEATHERSTONE, a regular contributor to Slate's Big Money Web site, is the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart.
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