Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Creative econ

The state is broke and where I work there will be deep cuts. 16 days a year furloughs. Basically all of the paid holidays are being taken away. Not the holidays mind you, but you will not get paid for them. You'll take them off without pay.

That's half a month of no pay. It's helpful that it's spread out over the year but it's still 1/2 a month of pay.

The bright side is the furloughs are supposed to help keep layoffs at a minimum. But there will still be layoffs. A few years ago (maybe 7 or 8) this company laid off a huge number of lower level employees rather than go for the higher paid employees. This time our big guy said he'd be gentler to the lower paid employees and go for high paid employees. It sounds good (and that's because I'm a way lower level emp) but I've been thru layoffs at other companies and what they say and what they do are 2 different things.

I've had to lay people off (my old job was in managament, I was one of the higher level employees) and our priorities were: Get rid of whatever you wanted as long as you got to X number of dollars.

I detest being paranoid about losing my job, it literally makes me sick. Am hoping writing about it will keep the paranoia at bay. Maybe it'll be the thing that kicks my butt into creatively figuring out how to make some extra money.

3 comments:

Donita Curioso said...

Boy, the California budget is THE topic of conversation in our office. Today our matriculation assistant was roaming around the office looking for places where she can store copy paper. She's going to order, like, a freakin' truckload of it because she can do that now. Next year there won't be enough money. We do a lot of big mailings so we really need that paper. She doesn't want to store it in the shared storeroom because she's afraid it'll get stolen! It reminds me of MASH, where the different units steal from each other so they can have the supplies they need. I can see us meeting in back alleys to get black market office supplies.

No layoffs are planned in our office but I'll still be working only 16 hours a week. I was supposed to go back up to 20 after July 1st.

VO said...

We've been spending the current budget money like it's going out of style because otherwise we won't have it. 2 months ago we ordered 20 cartons of paper because of this thing. We're only 20 or so in our office so it should last a while.

Are you guys funded by the state at all? We are, a big chunk o money.

Ya know we were talking about it today, the taking away of holidays means it's unlikely we'll get all the holidays we get now when holidays are reinstated. So far they won't let people cash in their 16 days in vacation time. Most of my office have so much vacation built up it's ridiculous.

Donita Curioso said...

Community colleges are funded by the state. So, yeah, we're screwed. At Christmas they were saying that we'll be ok because community colleges actually benefit (sort of) when there's an economic downturn because more people opt for the cheap education. Enrollment generally goes up. But I guess this isn't your average downturn. It's a mean mother.