Letter to Motorola (English) ==============================================================
Our group is representing the Internet-based organization "Moscow Illegals" To learn more about us we recommend you to visit our websites: www.nelegal.ru on Russian and www.nelegal.net on English. The main goal of our organization is fighting for human rights and freedom of movement against Moscow registration "propiska" regime - the variety of modern slavery.

Since many western companies came to Russia and opened their offices in Moscow, we have been expecting that they are going to bring new corporate atmosphere and new "fare play" game rules in the former closed society. But it has not happened.

Visitors of our websites are complaining that managers of Human resources department of "Motorola in Russia" in Moscow rejected their application just because they don"t have Moscow registration. We requested more personal data from this candidates and learned they are high educated, have enough experience, know foreign languages, and just talented and perspective. In some cases they came from different republics of Russia and had non-Slavic appearance and names. Some of candidates are just brilliant, many companies would be happy to hire such an employee. All of them were told: "We can not accept you application because you don"t have Moscow registration" This is a clear human rights violation and against even Russian Federal Law and Constitution.

Some statistics: there are about 150 million people in Russia and only 10 of them live in Moscow. 140 million of Russian people do not have the right to work in Moscow in companies such as Motorola, Siemens and so on. By the way, after our request Russian Siemens apologized and removed "propiska" requirement from their website. We are going to control the number of unregistered workers in Moscow Siemens later.

Dear Motorola management, we respect your company in many ways, but this is just inappropriate. On the Motorola web site on Russian at the top of the page "Our vacancies" http://www.motorola.ru/about/job/vacancies.htm we can see a beautiful motto" Motorola is the Company of equal opportunities", and at the bottom of the same page" Requirements to candidates: … Moscow registration is mandatory…" How can we understand that? Does it reflect your corporate hiring policies? Are you acting against the Russian Law and violating basic human rights? Could you please clear up this situation and inform visitors of our websites and us, how you are going to fix this problem. Also we would like to get information about hiring employees without Moscow registration in "Motorola in Russia" Moscow office in the future.

Best regards.