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Microsoft 'Orange Badge' Shadow Workforce Faces Layoff
The day of reckoning is nigh for a potentially huge number of orange-badged external staffers (contractors and vendors) within Microsoft. On July 1, 2014, five months into the Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO, a new company policy came down requiring orange-badged staffers to take a six month break after each 18-month stint [geekwire.com] at Microsoft. This kind of requirement wasn't unprecedented [prolango.com] at Microsoft; one class of contingent staffers, known as A- ("a-dash"), was already subject to a mandatory 100-day break after one year employment; however, V- ("v-dash") staffers could work indefinitely, without a break.
The clock started ticking for these workers when the policy was announced; at the time, the number of orange badged staffers was estimated to exceed 70,000. By comparison, the number of blue-badged regular full-time employees was about 100,000, prior to the Nokia acquisition in 2014.
GeekWire's Todd Bishop has published a followup story; on January 1, 2016 the eighteen months are up [geekwire.com] for external staffers who were on campus when the new policy went into effect.
A FAQ from an internal company email from July, 2014 [geekwire.com] obtained by GeekWire:
Q: What are External staff?
A: External staff is an umbrella term for individuals performing services for Microsoft on a non-permanent basis. Examples include consultants, temporary contract workers, vendor workers, freelancers, independent professionals and contractors, staff augmentation, and business guests.
Q: What is the new policy?
A: Any external staff who has access to the Microsoft corporate network or buildings may have access only for an 18-month period. At the end of the 18 months, the external staff will have their Microsoft corporate network and building access removed for a minimum of six months before access can be requested again.
Some vendors have been granted exemptions, according to GeekWire; also, other vendors have arranged to work remotely, taking advantage of the fact that the policy does not explicitly ban contractors from billing Microsoft after eighteen months, but rather terminates their building and network access.
