Employee Benefits Microsoft Offers a

Employee Benefits Microsoft offers a very high-quality employee benefits plan that is both comprehensive and flexible. The plan provides for a wide variety of benefits, allows employees to choose from several generous options found within those benefits, and offers extra perks outside of the general benefits. Besides employees Microsoft provides coverage for both spouses and children; in order to accommodate all employees it extend coverage to disparate family members such as same-sex domestic partners.

The Microsoft plan covers several major types of benefits, including those related to health, family and parenting, investment, and retirement. Microsoft allows employees to choose from a wide assortment of options within each benefit based on what is most suitable for them. The options range from being quintessential to being atypical. The options themselves are also made to be generous by Microsoft.

This can be observed for instance with the company's employee stock purchase plan, in which employees can buy company stock at a 10% discount by using between 1%-15% of their after-tax salary. The company's family and parenting benefits provide the best example of the diverse array of options offered to employees.

These include options that can typically be found in most benefit plans such as paid maternity and parental leave, in which mothers who give birth are given eight weeks of paid maternity leave and new parents in general are allowed up to four weeks of paid parental leave, and child-care discounts like 20% tuition discounts from nationwide providers.

Some of the more atypical options include features such as adoption assistance, in which up to $5,000.00 is reimbursed for costs associated with adoption, and family backup care, in which either center-based or in-home care services are provided to families whose normal care routine is temporarily disrupted. In addition to these generous options, Microsoft offers several more perks unrelated to the general benefits listed above. These include paid vacation leave, legal assistance, tuition reimbursement, and matching charitable donations among other choices.

Despite offering such a comprehensive benefits plan, Microsoft has not always been in compliance with laws governing these plans. In the case Vizcaino v. Microsoft Corporation the court ruled that the company denied some of its workers benefits under its Savings plus 401(k) plan (SPP) and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) based on the mistaken assumption that they were independent contractors and therefore not eligible for its benefits.

Even though these workers were originally hired on the basis of being independent contractors, for tax purposes the IRS reclassified them as being Microsoft employees. Due to this reclassification the workers requested eligibility for the SPP and ESPP benefits, of which they were subsequently denied. After initially losing the case at the District Court level the plaintiffs appealed, which led to the Oct. 3, 1996 Ninth Circuit Court panel ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

Microsoft requested for this ruling to be reviewed by the Ninth Circuit, which led to a reaffirmation of the panel's earlier decision. In coming to its decision, the court initially studied the agreements the workers.