The NYT article is talking about 121000 contractors.
Either Google has 121000 white-collar contractors, or the article also talks about blue-collar jobs.
These articles always get it wrong by completely failing to distinguish who exactly the TVCs are. They'll interview a less common white collar contractor but then use numbers for total contractors. A decisive majority of the actual white collar workers are FTEs.
The only contractors I work with, and not too closely at that, are the tier one support people for our product in the Philippines. And then there's some web developers, designers, and project managers who work for a web design firm, but their job seems pretty cushy so I wouldn't include them in this conversation.
