Microsoft Part-Time Move Creates a Stir

Microsoft Corp. announced that, beginning July 1, part-time workers who have completed an assignment of one year or longer at the software giant will be required to leave the company for 31 days.

Microsoft says it gives the company a chance to decide whether a part-timer is really needed over the long term and should be hired full time. But some observers see it as a move to avoid paying pension and other benefits to its more than 5,000 temporary workers.

“They [Microsoft] want to make it so workers aren’t eligible for pension benefits from Microsoft or the temp agency,” said David Stobaugh, an attorney who is representing current and former Microsoft part-timers in a class-action suit against the company.

The suit claims there are thousands of “permatemps” who have been employed by Microsoft over long periods of time and are therefore “common-law employees” with rights to a range of benefits.

Microsoft insists the new policy has nothing to do with the legal challenges to its treatment of part-timers or “permatemps.”

“It’s a smart move to understand what worker needs we have and where we should beef up,” said Jim Cullinan, a Microsoft spokesman. He said the move would also help improve relations between Microsoft, its staffing agencies and its part-time workers.

But staffing agencies serving Microsoft said the decision was clearly designed to help clarify the status of part-timers as legal employees of the agencies rather than of Microsoft.

“When someone is under Microsoft supervision for a long time, it’s natural to think Microsoft is the supervisor,” said Tom Stinson, president of General Employment, a Seattle agency that supplies Microsoft with clerical and other workers. “But the agency is the real employee. They [Microsoft] are working with agencies to make sure this doesn’t become a legal problem.”

In recent years, Microsoft has been using a number of staffing agencies in an effort to bypass Internal Revenue Service rules and other federal regulations that require employers to pay benefits to long-term employees.

Although the staffing or “payrolling” agencies actually issue the paychecks, part-timers are supervised by Microsoft managers and often perform the same work on the same schedules as regular Microsoft employees.

For part-timers, who have long expressed unhappiness at being treated as second-class citizens and having to share their salaries with staffing agencies that offer little in return, the recent policy is like rubbing salt in the wound.

“For most of us, there is no relationship with the agency and this [policy] won’t change that,” says Mike Blain, a part-timer who has been at Microsoft for 2 1/2 years. “It’s all a shell game.”

Blain said the policy announcement has angered many high-tech workers and has helped boost his effort to build the Washington Assn. of High-Tech Workers to represent workers on labor issues. “Now lots of people are calling, asking to join.”