[samirmenon]

The article never actually specifies whether the "mostly black and Latino" women who digitize the books are treated as independent contractors. It implies it, by launching into a section on Mechanical Turk, Uber, TaskRabbit, etc, but never actually discusses the book digitizers.

[hypatiadotca]

"yellow badges" are contractors at Google.

[TheCoelacanth]

They are contractors, but are they independent contractors? I think it's more likely that they are employees of a staffing firm that Google contracts out to for workers rather than independent contractors that Google contracts directly.

[hypatiadotca]

Because of the "permatemps" lawsuit against Microsoft back in the day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp), tech companies almost always hire contractors via staffing firms. I'm sure Google is no exception.

I also don't think it's particularly important to this story, but ymmv.