Sitting in the audience, listening to Maffei's remarks, Judd felt "like I was being punched in the stomach. I must have looked like it too. People kept whispering to me, 'Are you okay? Are you okay?' He was telling my peers that I wasn't good."
The incident not only made Judd uneasy; it also reminded her that she had some serious, unanswered questions about her future and about the role of permatemps at Microsoft. On one hand, she knew that it would be foolish for her to feel entitled, or even attached, to her job at Microsoft. The company had guaranteed her nothing except a specific wage and had told her explicitly that it could let her go at any moment. She made $32 an hour plus overtime -- more than she might have made on an hourly basis as a full-time employee -- but she had no Microsoft stock options and a less-than-ample benefits package through the temp agency. On the other hand, temps like Judd were questioning what made permatemps different from regular employees. Why couldn't she join the club?
For all of the uncertainty and all of the unanswered questions, several signs cropped up that seemed encouraging to temps looking to land full-time positions. Within one year of the project's start, Microsoft converted four of Judd's colleagues to full-time status. Judd and many of her coworkers had worked together on tax software for a different company in the past, and four managers from that previous project got those four full-time slots at Microsoft. Once those four workers were promoted, Microsoft's project managers spent the next year trying to encourage Judd and the other temps to be patient, reminding them that Microsoft needed their tax product in order to have a full suite of financial software to bring to market.
While Judd waited, she had to live by a long list of rules that come with a temp worker's status at Microsoft. Temporary employees, whether they have worked at the company for a week or for two years, are not allowed to play on the Microsoft ball fields, get a free membership to a local gym, or join any of the employee-affinity groups. Badges that the company issues to temps are orange, rather than blue. And, on the Microsoft email system, an "A" is printed before the name of temps who are assigned through local staffing agencies -- a designation that temps say makes their email opinions easier to dismiss. There's more: Temps can't buy discounted software at the company store. In fact, they can't buy it at all, for any price, even if they wrote the instructions inside the box.
With her day-to-day work constrained by demeaning employment rules and her future job status uncertain, why didn't Judd simply leave? "Getting another job isn't quite as easy as you might think," she says. "Microsoft doesn't want us to put their company name on our r?sum? as our employer. They say that the temp agency is our employer, even if we worked at Microsoft for two years. When people see that you've been working through a temp agency, they think that you have an unstable work history, so they toss your r?sum? into the trash can."
Besides, Judd argues, why should she have to leave? "The courts have ruled that Microsoft controls the terms of our work, that we're common-law full-time employees. So don't ask me why I didn't leave," she says. "Ask Microsoft why it didn't do what the courts say it should have done and given me the privileges that all full-time employees get when they work for the company."
But to Microsoft, the job never was permanent. After more than two years, Microsoft announced on March 22 that it was discontinuing work on its tax software that very day. The company gave Judd and her colleagues 48 hours to clean out their desks.
To many outsiders, there is a simple solution to the permatemps problem at Microsoft: They should just quit and strike a better deal somewhere else. But to Marcus Courtney, that line of reasoning doesn't match his understanding of how most people work. "The 'love it or leave it' argument might make sense for some people," Courtney says. "But why should you have to love every single term that comes along with an employment contract? If you're at Microsoft, working with cutting-edge technology in areas that interest you, isn't it possible that you might want to stay and try to improve the things that bother you?"
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