Tech giant Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will be laying off approximately 7,800 employees worldwide, bringing a denunciation from a federal lawmaker who says the firings expose the company’s calls for more immigration. The firings, which will eliminate about 7 percent of the company’s workforce, are concentrated in Microsoft’s troubled mobile phone business, and will eliminate most of the remaining employees from its purchase of Nokia’s phone operation in 2013. Only some of the layoffs are in the U.S., with Finland being hit especially hard with over 2,000 jobs lost. The firings follow up on the 18,000 layoffs the company made last year, which were also concentrated in the phone business.
Now, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is slamming Microsoft, saying the layoffs show it is being dishonest when it lobbies for increased immigration into the United States.
“Microsoft has shed roughly 1/5th of its workforce in the past couple years,” Sessions said in a statement sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “And yet Microsoft, perhaps more than any other major U.S. company, has claimed it suffers from a shortage of capable American workers and must therefore import more H-1B foreign guest workers.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-lays-off-thousands-while-demanding-more-h1-b-visas/#ixzz3fL820sYW