The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to complicate how employers approach temporary layoffs and furloughs spawned by lost revenues and reduced demands for their services. As if navigating the employment-based immigration laws weren’t complicated enough, now employers must balance implementing cost-saving measures with their federal obligations to employer-sponsored migrant workers.
Riding the Bench
Let me explain: As a cost-saving measure, a company advises its employees that each employee is required to take a certain number of unpaid hours or days off, every week or every month, through the end of the year. If it employs H-1B workers, this measure potentially runs afoul of the federal laws governing their conditions for employment. In the immigration world, this is referred to as “benching.”
