Senator wants Microsoft to preserve American jobs over those of foreign guest workers
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday expressing affair over how the company may custom about its layoffs.
“I am concerned that Microsoft will be retaining foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American employees at the time it implements its layoff plan,” Grassley said in the letter, posted to his Web site.
The company announced plans to divide a net 2,000 to 3,000 jobs Thursday, its first and foremost companywide layoff.
The senator asked Ballmer for details on the jobs to be eliminated; how people are held by H-1B or other work visa program employees; by what means frequent are held through Americans and, of those positions, how many similar positions held by foreign guest workers are being retained; and how many H-1B or other labor visa program workers Microsoft will retain at what time the layoff is complete.
“My quirk is that for the period of a layoff, companies should not be retaining H-1B or other be visa program employees over qualified American workers,” Grassley wrote. “Our immigration policy is not intended to harm the American workforce. … Microsoft has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first for the time of these difficult economic times.”
Grassley pointed out that Microsoft has lobbied Congress for an dilatation of the H1-B program.
The program, as Grassley’sitting office described it in a recent accounts release, “allows American companies and universities to employ temporary irrelevant guest workers who be seized of the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree in a job category that is considered by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to be a ’specialty calling.’ The purpose of the H-1B program is to help companies buy up strange guest workers in succession a temporary basis when in that place is not a sufficient qualified American workforce to meet those necessarily.”
A Microsoft spokeswoman told Reuters, that the company had not received the literal sense, but would respond to Grassley directly.
“I’m not mindful of any rule that says you have to lay off H-1B workers before anyone else,” declared Cletus Weber, founder and partner with Mercer Island-based immigration law firm Peng & Weber. [Update, 4:45 p.gallimaufry.: Weber did some additional research and added this via e-mail:
“I believe arbitrarily laying off lawfully employed foreign workers first would subject these companies to potential legal liability under federal anti-discrimination laws.
“Perhaps Senator Grassley forgot that Google and innumerable other large and small American companies that were founded by foreign workers have created tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. It is laudable on the side of Senator Grassley to victor the cause of the American worker, but his calling for blatantly discriminatory layoffs is anti-competitive scapegoating, and in many ways removes some of the innovation that created large numbers of American jobs in the first place.”]
In 2007, Microsoft declared that about one-third of its 46,000 U.S.-based employees at the time had operate visas or were legal permanent residents with green cards.
Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2009/01/23/senator_wants_microsoft_to_preserve_american_jobs.html
