Coffee heat rising

Workplace issues

Interview No. 1

by

Yesterday afternoon I had the first interview in the new job search, for a program manager’s position at a prominent local cultural landmark. It seemed to go well. I think they liked me, and it certainly is a job I could do well. On the other hand, I’m pretty long in the tooth. The East Valley Tribune just laid off 120 employees, and so a great raft of people in “communications” will swarm across the land in search of jobs.

If I don’t get this job or something like it very quickly, I’m going to be in deep trouble. With the market tanking, my savings will not support me, not by a long shot. Apparently it can take up to three months after you apply for Social Security to start. If it is true that credit is pretty much nonexistent, selling my house or even borrowing against it to get enough to live on is an unlikely prospect. Unlike GDU’s HR people, the UofA tells retirees that RASL—the amount the state pays for unused sick leave—is considered earned income, not a retirement benefit, and so is taxable at your regular rate. This would cut the annual amount I’m supposed to get for that over the next three years to around $4,000. COBRA alone will cost $5,000 a year. I may end up without health insurance, since I may not be able to pay for it and also eat.

I do not know what I am going to do if I don’t get another job quickly.

At any rate, after the interview I wandered around the grounds and ended up in a monarch butterfly exhibit. There I met a meeter & greeter who was all alone and happy to deliver her lecture on the wonders of butterflies. When I remarked that I had just interviewed for a job, she said she had started there as a volunteer and wangled her way into paying work. She said she loved it; the place is a great place to work.

News from GDU is uniformly negative. The library director at the West campus has been replaced by a part-time interim director whose job, we are told, is to figure out what to cut. Librarians no longer have a budget to buy books, and the president is trying to spread the West campus’s library budget among all four campuses. Staff expect widespread layoffs in the near future.

While strolling around the gardens, I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful to work for a place whose management you don’t hate!

Well, we’ll see. I don’t hold out much hope. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Here’s what it looks like at the place where I’d like to work.


The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5. Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

Unemployment for Christmas?

by

Rumor has it that a big announcement is coming down: along about mid-October, the PtB (Powers that Be) will announce that everyone in my job classification is to be laid off. That’s a lot of layoffs, even for a gigantic learning factory whose student body is larger than the entire populations of most of the state’s counties.

The jobs in question are so poorly paid that all Our Beloved Leader would have to do is cut the six-figure salaries of his trophy hires by 5% to make up the part of the payroll that goes to the likes of us.

The rulebook that governs the university’s operation specifies that employees in this category have to be given 90 days notice of nonrenewal or dismissal. Conveniently, if O.B.L. makes this announcement on October 15, our time will be up on the last day of the semester, December 15. This will keep the donkeys in harness until they finish their current round of plow-dragging.

I’ve already found a job to apply for: $15,000 a year less than I’m earning, but at least it’s an income, and the place is only about five or ten minutes from my house. Truth to tell, I could cheerfully forego 15 grand to be free of the hideous commute to lovely downtown Tempe. Last night the freeway was gridlocked; plodding home across the surface streets into the glare of the setting sun took well over an hour. Besides, GDU will owe me $17,500 in tax-free severance pay, to be doled out over three years. A third of that sum added to the proposed new net annual pay will add up to a larger net than I’m now taking home.

Plus the coveted new employer pays ALL your health insurance, AND it offers a “cafeteria plan” that gives you an extra $600 to put toward three pay-it-yourself plans…one of which is a flex plan. So in other words, if you want the flex plan, you don’t have to pay for it out of your regular salary. And, interestingly, instead of automatically taking 7% out of your salary (and matching it) for a 403(b), this outfit offers a simple IRA for which 3% is deducted…leaving you with dollars to put into your own Roth IRA.

So, weirdly, even though the gross pay is lower, the net may be about the same or even higher, with or without the extra income from GDU’s good-bye gift.

It remains to be seen whether this rumor is true. This evening at the Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig, we sat at the same table with a GDU colleague who was privileged to attend our Dean’s meeting with the chairs. She reported that Her Deanship announced, as she had promised to do, that our office is seeking a new client journal.

If our dean’s boss is about to can me, which will shut our office down, why is she telling the world we’ll take on new work? A very limited number of possibilities present themselves:

  • She hasn’t been told about the plan.
  • She is pretending not to have been told about the plan.
  • She doesn’t know what my job classification is.
  • They don’t plan to include me among the cannees.

None of those scenarios is out of the realm of possibility. In fact, they’re ranged in order from most likely to least likely.

WhatEVER.

Next week I’m meeting with my financial adviser to figure out how I can survive if I don’t get another job. This weekend I will fill out a job application, update the résumé, and write a cover letter, to be shipped off to the proposed new employer on Monday. And I will finish editing a freelance client’s copy, earning another $500 this month. The Copyeditor’s Desk is attracting a surprising number of clients—tonight I believe we may have picked up two or three more—and the truth is that we may manage to develop this business well enough so that neither of us will have to work for the university. Or for anyone else, besides ourselves.

The Continuing Saga…

1.Unemployment for Christmas?
2.Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3.Rumors start to fly
4.On the trail of the elusive job
5.Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?

Best jobs, worst jobs

by

J.D. Roth’s Labor Day post at Get Rich Slowly, in which he recites all the jobs he’s ever held and asks readers to describe their best and worst gigs, got me thinking about my checkered career. For a person who’s on the verge of retirement, I haven’t held all that many jobs, especially if you don’t count the twenty years as a generously supported lawyer’s wife, mother, and society matron—less than a dozen, some of which were part-time.

Which were the best jobs and which the worst? And did my hypereducation do anything to help land the best ones? What, if anything, would I do differently, given a chance to start over?

At GRS, I left a comment opining that my most hated job was as a secretary for a demented market researcher. The guy was truly paranoid: convinced he had Enemies (no joke!) who spent every evening sifting through the trash behind the office building, looking for corporate intelligence with which to do his business in. He insisted that every, single piece of trash be snipped up into confetti—this predated inexpensive shredders—before it went in the trash. The job also predated word processors, and since I was not a great typist I threw out a lot of botched letters and memos; these also had to be snipped up, even if only a few words appeared on the page. My employer was given to insane rages and casual insults, an altogether obnoxious gentleman.

But really, what made that a bad job was the wacko boss, not the job itself. I enjoyed working as a receptionist and probably would have enjoyed secretarial or clerical work in any office environment where the boss was blessed with normal mental health.

The real worst job I’ve ever done is teaching freshman composition. After I finished the Ph.D. and several years of TAing, during which I taught many sections of both regular and advanced composition, I swore I’d go on welfare before I ever did that again. Years later, I landed a full-time lecturership, which paid as much as an associate professorship, teaching writing and editing to university juniors and seniors. For a long time, this was a fine job. Then after I’d been there about eight years, the university decided to turn that satellite campus into a four-year institution. Everyone was expected to teach freshman comp, whether they had degrees in English or not.

Ugh. I was right the first time around. If I’d wanted to teach high-school kids, I would have gotten a teaching certificate. At least if you teach high school, you can live wherever you choose, not wherever you can get work. In fact, in my desperation I looked into taking a postgraduate teaching certificate: to get it, I would have been required to take the very upper-division courses I was teaching (!), and I would have started at $24,000, a $19,000 cut in pay!

My favorite jobs—because they were the most fun—were editorial positions at Phoenix and Arizona Highways magazines. Journalists don’t earn much, but they have a good time going hungry. I enjoyed every moment, even the overnighters (which came once a month at Phoenix Magazine), loved writing features, loved editing copy, loved working with artists and photographers, and liked all my bosses and colleagues.

And no doubt the best job I’ve had is the one I hold right now, directing a university’s editorial office, where our staff of five does preproduction work for scholarly journals. The workload is almost nil, because I can delegate most of it to my associate editor and three graduate assistants. Pay is not great, but it’s more than I’ve ever made before. And I don’t waste too much of my time sitting around the office.

So…what effect did hypereducation—I have a B.A. in French and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English—have on this mottled career?

The hateful secretarial job required no higher education at all—the previous incumbent had been my cousin, who didn’t yet have an A.A. (she later became a registered nurse). Neither did the nice little receptionist’s job; however, the B.A. did get me the highest starting salary any receptionist had every earned at that firm, a munificent $300 a month.

The teaching assistantships were associated with graduate school: you TAed because you were in the program. The editorial jobs required a B.A. in journalism or English. Again, at Arizona Highways I was paid a premium for the advanced degrees, and in fact I landed the job because the editor was looking for someone with above-average competence.

I fell into the lecturership because I was assuredly the only English Ph.D. in the state with 15 years of real-world writing and editorial experience. At the same time I was hired, the department hired as my opposite number a man with a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford: presumably an M.A. from Stanford = a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, which oughta tell you something. I earned more than he did, though: approximately six dollars a year more.

The doctorate was not de rigueur for the job I’ve got now, but it certainly thrilled the hiring committee. It also got me a starting salary about $30,000 higher than the university had planned to pay the successful applicant.

So yes, the higher ed helped with the jobs I did get. If I’d started in journalism when I finished the B.A., though, by now I’d probably own Phoenix Magazine and be retired on its proceeds.

If I had it to do over, what would I do differently?

Well, if I knew when I was 22 what I know now, I would still get advanced degrees, but you can be sure they wouldn’t be in the humanities. I probably would combine an M.B.A. and an LL.D. in an attempt to develop a heavy-hitting corporate career. Or I would get a Ph.D. in business management, which opens the door to far better-paying academic jobs than you can get with the same degree in the humanities.

There’s no question that higher education, even in the liberal arts, sets you up for better-paying jobs. And there’s also no question that certain degrees, even some that won’t kill you with difficult coursework, will do better for you than others.

So…what are your best and worst jobs? And what would you do differently if you could start from scratch?

Another bullet dodged

by

So, once again I’ve escaped the attention of upper management. In the current “reorganization,” eighteen chairs and two deans were demoted, twenty-eight administrative and support staff were laid off; and an unknown number of unannounced layoffs continue to lay waste to the custodial crew.

My dean, thank all the gods on Olympus, remains in place, and so do I.No hiring freeze was announced, so the search for the replacement for the director of the program whose graduate students staff my office continues apace.This means I have a job (probably) at least until the end of my current contract, next June. By then I can retire with no serious harm, although, like Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not.

Whew! I could practically hear that slug whistling through the air past my noggin.

Times are getting bad, possibly worse than most of us realize. La Maya reports that in California her niece, who has been working for the booming prison industry at a very nice salary, just learned her pay would be cut to a little over $6 an hour — minimum wage! Picture trying to live in California, anywhere in California, on that!

If you’ve got a job and you can hang onto it, cling for all you’re worth. This is not a time to make reckless moves.

Is the Layoff Boom about to Fall?

by

Out at the Great Desert University, rumors float on the breeze like leaves in the autumn air. We our told that Our Leader will make a momentous announcement on the first day of the fall semester, in a week or so. Nothing anyone hears indicates the contents of this message will please the peons. Some expect to hear of massive layoffs. Others expect a hiring freeze. Still others predict we will be told the satellite campuses are to be deemed “teaching campuses” and the main campus will be the “research institution.” Paranoia rises. The facts support the general angst but confirm none of the dire predictions.

Factoid:

The university’s budget has been slashed to and peeled off the bone.

Factoid:

Our Leader’s elaborate building campaign, which could bankrupt a healthy institution in good times, continues apace.

Factoid:

Caps on class sizes have risen into the stratosphere. Lecturers and instructors — nontenurable faculty who teach four or five sections a semester — groan under obscene courseloads, with ten times more students than anyone could reasonably be expected to teach adequately. Tenure-track and tenured faculty also find themselves facing classrooms filled with more students than they can teach. Faculty are eliminating most or all writing assignments and assessing performance on the basis of a few machine-graded, computerized exams.

Factoid:

HR staff have been seen acting strangely. They refuse to meet your eyes, and at “benefits fairs” their responses to questions make it clear they’ve been told, on pain of dire consequences, to keep their tongues on a tight leash. One of them remarked to a colleague, semiprivately, “Oh…you don’t know what’s happening.”

Factoid:

Administrative staff who do know what’s up have leaked hints that something very grim is slouching toward Bethlehem.

What to Make of It?

Heaven only knows. I hesitate to assume the worst, although knowing that place, anything is possible. If we do indeed face layoffs, I would be high on the list of the expendable. My job is exempt, meaning my contract says I can be canned at any time, for no reason. Although one could argue that our office supports the university’s core mission of research and publication, others could say faculty could get by just fine without us. If the bad news is “only” a hiring freeze (unlikely: the last hiring freeze was not announced from the balcony with trumpets blaring fanfares), my job will still be at risk, since the director of the graduate program whose students staff our office walked with short notice this summer. A hiring freeze will mean he can’t be replaced, which will mean his program will die instantly, which will mean my office will quickly go away because my staff will disappear. In either event, I lose my job.

I’m now eligible to take early Social Security payments, although I would prefer not to. If I collect SS now, the amount will be peanuts. If I wait until I’m 66 (or even 65, when Medicare kicks in), my income will be slightly more generous. I’ll be 65 in 22 months; COBRA will cover me for 18 months, and so if I can hang onto my job for just four more months, I can at least keep myself insured if I’m laid off.

Being averse, as I am, to jumping off the high wire without a safety net, I reconnoitered the resources I could use to survive if I’m canned. Figuring 4% of my retirement savings as a drawdown and subtracting from that the 12 grand that’s going into the Investment House, investment income right now would be $10,254. Because I haven’t yet applied the Renovation Loan payoff fund toward principal but instead have stashed the money in low-risk mutual funds, I have $9,848 in cash that I could live on. The university has to pay me for 175 of my 275 hours of accrued vacation time at my regular pay rate; the figure on my paycheck seems to says that amount is $3,214, a little more than one month’s net pay (I believe they have to pay my gross rate for this, which would come to $5,280). Also, the state pays retiring employees who have accrued 1,000 hours of sick leave a kind of severance bonus in the amount of 50% of their hourly wage per sick-leave hour; for me this would come to $17,160. It’s not paid in one swell foop, however: they dole it out over three years. So, in the first year after severance I would get $5,714. Pretax Social Security, if I started taking it this year, would add $12,228 to the pot.

Amazingly, all these bits and pieces add up to something close to my net pay. Though the bottom line is pretax, few of the figures that go into it are earned income, and so my taxes might be relatively low.

COBRA will inflate my healthcare premiums from $30 to $473 per month, but even that would be affordable for a couple of years. It would be tight, but I might not be forced to move out of my home, especially if I could engineer a steady flowof freelance work.

Thank goodness I saved the Renovation Loan snowflakes to double as an emergency fund, instead of paying them directly to the loan principle!

Matter o’fact, the scenario above isso positive that I wondered what would happen if I delayed collecting Social Security. Could I get by until I can collect full Social Security payments? Well….

Foregoing Social Security for two more years, I’d have to come up with an extra $7,000 to make ends meet, just barely.

But that’s not unreasonable: I could pull it off with a part-time job — maybe greeting shoppers at the WalMart! Here, too, a steady flow of freelance work would do the trick. At The Copyeditor’s Desk we’re hoping to make $1,000 a month per person by the end of the year. If we meet that goal, next year’s $12,000 annual income would just about replace the amount of Social Security I’d get if I started drawing payments now.

So, if they can me, the world is not going to end. I may have to sell my home, but not right away. There will at least be time to see if I can get by, cobbling together a living from four to six different sources. A year or so hence, though, I’ll have to either cut my expenses drastically or find income to replace the one-time vacation pay reimbursement and the three years of sick leave payments. The slightly increased Social Security payments I would have by waiting to collect until I’m 65 will not substitute for those amounts.

I don’t like it. But I’ll survive.

A$king and re¢eiving

by

“A$k and ye shall re¢eive” is the motto of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, to which I used to belong until I figured out that freelance writing is a losing proposition. ASJA put me on to the fact that publishers don’t pay a fair rate for work done; they pay what they know they can get away with. They bank on the tendency of writers to work in their own little garrets, to cultivate social lives best described as null and void, and to be way too shy to ask other writers how much they earn. Magazine publishers in particular will pay one writer, say, $1.00 a word and another 50¢ or 75¢ for the same kind of work of the same quality. They recognize that some wannabe writers are so anxious to see their bylines in print they not only would work for free, they’d pay the magazine to publish them, and so the magazine plays that for all it’s worth. Which is plenty.

Entertainingly, today I learned that book publishers will do something similar when they outsource editorial work. My young business partner (late one of my research assistants) and I have been proofreading detective novels for a company that publishes nothing but mystery fiction. Because the work is easy and the copy so entertaining it’s hard to believe anyone would pay you to read it, we’ve been accepting the publisher’s offered rate of $12 an hour.

In response to our talking up our new enterprise, The Copyeditor’s Desk,a book packaging company e-mailed me and asked our rates for proofreading. Without thinking about the mystery publisher, I gave her a rate on the very lowest end of what I actually expect to earn: $25 an hour. Proofreading does not rise to the level of rocket science, and so I couldn’t reasonably ask for the amount I try to get by manipulating my copyediting page rate to fit the difficulty of the copy: $60 an hour. But on the other hand, there comes a point where you can’t just give it away. I figured $25 would be a bit rich for her blood.

To my astonishment, she wrote back and said our proposed rate was in the range of what they’ve been paying others.

Whoa! You are paying proofreaders twenty-five bucks an hour? You’re paying more than twice what we’ve been earning reading mystery novels? Are we talkin’ the same people who have the skills you could have expected from a bright high-school graduate a quarter-century ago?

Huh. Wonder what they would have paid if I’d suggested their arcane interior decorating books need a proofreader with a Ph.D. to make them right. . .

So the message is this: Don’t be shy about asking what you think your time is worth. If you don’t get it, maybe it’s for the best: the next client or employer will come up to your standards. And find out, even if it means bald-facedly asking colleagues what they earn, how much others in your trade or profession are earning for similar work.
Ignoran¢e is not bli$$.