> I must misunderstand, are you implying that employment via a subcontractor would increase their salary?

Subcontracted workers are technically not employees of Google, therefore can be disregarded when making claims about the min salary of employees.

They are using subcontractors for at least some of these positions. But I don't know whether for all, hence my suggestion to ensure they outsource all the lowly paid position, if they wanted to hit this arbitrary metric.

It's all a bit tongue in cheek and silly.

It does have some real world consequences because of some regulation that requires companies to publish some information about the ratio between CEO pay to lowest paid employee.

But as we noted here, who is officially an employee and who ain't is flexible.

Uber and eBay and Amazon are an even more extreme example: Uber drivers and eBay sellers are at the heart of what makes those companies tick. But they are not employees.

He's saying that if Google wanted another way to present themselves as a progressive company, they could fire everyone who works for them doing a marginal job and replace them with contractors. This would allow them to set a higher minimum salary and pretend that they are very generous. In reality, they would have fired a lot of people and the contractors would be worse off than they were as employees and this would all have been a cynical ploy to appear good while really being evil. In other words, OP is being cynical about whether this company policy is really as progressive as it's made out to be, or might represent a dirtier trend.

I understand that if the low salary workers are employed via a subcontractor, that workers salary is irrelevant for the average salary you are paying.