Dude, this is capitalism, not Disneyland. The company make use of this loopholes by using a subcontractor. That's the whole point. Their loophole is to avoid all the good stuff by subcontracting certain unneeded work of their company to some other company, which again uses different laws and different loopholes to pay their employees less. In the end they all pay less, earn more and everyone is happy - except for the actual women who has to clean the toilets, serve in the kitchen or has to clean your office. And of corse it works, otherwise corporations wouldn't do it. When I went to school, they began to organize a cafeteria (for some reasons only on Wednesdays, AFAIK), which was at fist staffed with mothers from the pupils. Later they build a proper cafeteria, which was then staffed by normal employees. But they were certainly not employed by the school, or the education office of Hamburg. They were part of an catering company, and they were certainly not paid the same as those who are directly employed by the city (teachers are in most cases public officials, but they try to change that, so they save some money).

As I said. When you work for the main company you have certain advantages. When you work for a "Zeitarbeitsfirma" you are not part of the main personnel. You work for an entire different company. You have less rights, you get payed less and you are not part of a union, a working council, or whatsoever. A very different set of laws is applied to you, which could not be applied if you would have a regular working contract. There are labor protection laws, that prohibited certain behavior in companies, but it does not prohibit that you subcontract a whole different company, who gives a shit about if you can feed your family from your wage, because you "just" employ "part time unemployed", "temporary worker" and whatever they are called, so they don't count as unemployed for the statistics. Or you employ foreigners or citizens, not educated enough to know their rights.

Organize yourself into unions often is a question of education. Highly paid, highly educated jobs like pilots, have strong unions, do strikes and often get their demands when it comes to higher wages in new labor agreements (they earn some 73.000 to 225.000 € pre-tax a year, depending on your rank). People working in the low-pay sector are not organized, there are no agreed wages - or at least none on industry level, as in industries where there is a higher level of worker organization. They are all paid ~ 420€ or even less and thus have to get Hartz 4 in addition.

PS: Under certain circumstances in computer science there are cases where 1 + 1 does not equal 2. So, yeah we can't rule out anything.

or, you know, the giant multitrillion dollar corporations have a "different" company that runs cafeterias and such, as has already been pointed out. not to mention that in a lot of places, the multitrillion dollar corporation is the one that makes the laws (either officially, as is the case in extraterritorial land, or unofficially, as is the case when a megacorporation has control of the government by various means - blackmail, bribery, being aztechnology in mexico, etc - and since none of the megas benefit from stronger labour laws, it often won't matter *which* mega is in control, because you don't want to be *too* obvious about who actually runs the government or it could create bad press for you).

That, and governments are cost centers. Why control the government when you can just write yourself a law for the government to pass when it's convenient, and have the government do the work of maintaining the infrastructure the rest of the time? You don't even need bribery to get the law passed, just threaten to pull your company out or build your new office in another city. I can't imagine the world Shadowrun is in is significantly better than ours in that respect.

well, mostly because it's cheaper to bribe (or blackmail, etc) someone than it is to cease all business operations in the area, i suspect. not to mention withdrawing all presence from the area is a highly visible move, one that is likely to draw attention to who is pulling the strings. you don't want people complaining that your corporation obviously forced the government into less generous labour laws, you want people blaming the government (but preferably not the specific person you already bribed, because that would mean you need to bribe someone else and future politicians will be harder to bribe if they expect it to cost them their job).

i suppose in extreme situations a mega might threaten to pull out, but most of the time it really isn't a threat you want to make good on. there are going to need to be some *really* nasty laws in the process of being made for that to happen. on the other hand, if you follow through on blackmail threats and destroy the politician's reputation such that they will never be able to work again, not only do they serve as an example (benefit), and get to continue operating in that area (benefit), you also get to make a ton of money through the media branches of your corporation (benefit).