Coffee heat rising

Workplace issues

Why I secretly feel glad my job is ending…

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Overjoyed, even.

Today I started about 8:30 ayem and worked straight through until 6:30 p.m. without a break—well, with one break long enough to bolt down a piece of cheese slapped on some dry bread—typing the last stage of an index.

My RA had compiled about half the book’s index; I took the rest. It was possible for us to do this because the book is a collection of essays. I was careful to give her essays whose subject matter would not much overlap the pieces I kept for myself to work on. Late last night, she e-mailed me her list of subject headings and subheadings (unformatted). I was just finishing the job of plowing through and marking up my  half of the page proofs, so today had to go through the proofs and compile my list, which I entered in the file she’d sent me. Then I had to alphabetize the headings; format each entry with indented subheads; alphabetize the subheads; format the entire 28-page document properly; proofread.

The word-processing alone occupied ten hours. Ten of the most mind-numbing hours you can imagine.

Two things on this earthly plane, and only two things, are more boring than compiling an index: formatting it and proofreading it.

It’s not that writing an index is especially difficult. Really: in principle it’s pretty simple. But I do have to say that reading scholarly copy for a fourth time, after having gone through each article at least three times during the editing process, is less than a thrill a minute. One of these articles is 148 typeset pages long, and it requires the indexer to ponder a minute discussion of homage and castle-guard among provincial aristocrats in 13th-century France, brought to you in English, French, and Latin. Subject matter is arcane, language is demanding, and the indexer has to know what she’s doing and stay awake to do it.

When reading freshman comp papers begins to look good, you know you’re in trouble.

This is not the first time I’ve felt my job is excruciatingly boring. Far from it. Indeed, when I first noticed  the thought that entered my mind as the car rolled onto the freeway, outward-bound, was “I can’t wait to get home,” it occurred to me to wonder why I found myself anxious to leave the office while I was still 22 miles away from the office. Didn’t take long to figure it out: bored.

I’ve been so bored, I could barely stand to drive out to that place. So bored I have seriously wondered if I could make a living stringing beads and selling the jewelry at craft fairs and on Etsy.com. So bored I’ve considered buying a run-down cold-water shack on the desert and becoming an anchorite.

Understand, the journal that publishes arcane studies of medieval and Renaissance history is the most interesting and best written of our client publications! Indeed, it’s a very fine journal, featuring top-flight scholarship by highly professional, often senior scholars. This is a claim we cannot make about all our client journals. The math journal is pretty good, except of course that none of us can understand a thing the mathematicians are saying.  And any day, thank you, I’d rather read about medieval cartularies than contemplate the maunderings of radical feminists indulging in cultural studies, especially when they turn their criticism to the white male hegemony of the hard sciences, a subject of which few if any of them have the vaguest comprehension. On the other hand, one has to say the radical feminists do not bore: they annoy. Especially when they’re in prima donna mode, which, given the fact that professionalism is apparently part of the white male hegemony, most of them are, most of the time.

Along about 5:00 I was reduced to tears when, asked to do a replace-all on a selection, my computer reformatted the entire document…and then would not undo!

I’d made it to the Rs. The stuff before the Rs was more or less OK, although it would require close reading and some fixing. But everything after the Rs was scrambled eggs. The choices were to crash out of the file and revert to an older saved version, thereby throwing out about two hours’ worth of dreary, mind-numbing, ditzy, tedious, dry, eyeball-parching work, or to unscramble the eggs. I chose unscrambling.

Finally finished and shot the file back to my RA for her proofreading (lucky she!), just in time to race out the door to choir practice.

This is the last significant job that remains to me to do for the Great Desert University. My beloved employer owes me something in excess of 350 hours of accumulated vacation time, but it will pay for only 176 of those hours. So, the minute this journal goes to the printer—which it should do by Thanksgiving, with any luck at all—I am gone. Out. Exit stage left, never to return.

And never, ever to write another index again.

Beads, anyone?

Managing a large workload

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Full-time faculty at the community colleges here teach five and five: five sections a semester. That is a huge workload, especially for English faculty, who teach almost nothing but composition courses. A few senior people manage to land survey of lit courses, but most are teaching comp and remedial sections.

It’s unlikely Glendale Community College will hire me into the full-time position for which I’m interviewing next week. But just in case… It might be good to know how one would handle a very workful job like that.

Writing courses, of which composition is a variant, are extremely work-intensive. Students learn by writing and by getting feedback from knowledgeable readers. This means you not only have to grade their opuses, you have to try to comment intelligently on them. It’s a tall order when you’re looking at 100 or more students. How can any human being possibly grade that many papers, week in and week out, without dying of overwork?

Just now I’m using rubrics—lists of criteria agreed upon by the instructor and the students—to grade their papers. The rubric strategy allows me to gloss over errors that are outside the assignment’s parameters, including some issues that, in earlier incarnations, I would have attacked. So: when one limits oneself strictly to a set of rubrics, how long does it take to grade a set of papers?

The Monday students at Paradise Valley turned in the final drafts of their second essays last week. I brought the kitchen timer into the study, and here was the result:

Difference between the mean and the average time required to grade the first 11 papers that I read was negligible. All in all, it takes about 19 minutes per 750-word paper, if you’re moving fast and not being too picky. Probably requires a little more, since I neglected to start the timer just as I started some of those papers. At about 20 minutes per paper, how long should it take to plow through an entire section’s Golden Words?

The District caps composition classes at 25, but as a practical matter quite a few students drop during the first few weeks, so sizes should average around 20. So six hours and 30 or 40 minutes is probably a reasonable estimate of the time it would take to grade one set of papers from one class

It doesn’t count count the many distractions and extra work-makers that interfere, however. While I read these papers, for example, my computer crashed twice; the phone rang several times; the dog pestered me now and again; my client sent a raft of new documents to read; the choir director asked me to write a few lines of copy; and several times I had to google students’  factoids and assertions, leading me to wander the labyrinths of the Internet. So the activity of grading can be pretty gestalt. There’s no way you could get 6 2/3 uninterrupted hours to just sit down and get the job done.

But let’s suppose the total amount of time required to read one raft of papers came to only 6.67 hours. An instructor can control the number of papers that arrive at a single time by a) refusing to accept late papers and b) staggering the classes’ due dates. If you were skilled at this, could you limit your workload to no more than 40 hours a week?

Interesting!

In theory, you could accept as many as four sets of papers in a week without having to put in a 50- or 60-hour work week.

In reality, of course, that’s outrageous. In the first place, full-time faculty do a lot more than teach: they’re involved in faculty governance; they tutor and advise students one-on-one; and they enjoy endless, mind-numbing meetings. So three rafts of papers are probably about as much as you could handle in a normal week—that assumes you’d only have about five hours of meetings, student conferences, and other activities, a conservative estimate.

If you could engineer things so that you never had more than two sets of papers due in a single week, about 30 hours of class time and grading time would leave plenty of hours for the rest of the shenanigans involved in a full-time teaching job and allow you to have your evenings and weekends to yourself. More or less.

The take-away message here, if there is one, is that if you have any control over the due dates of incoming work, you should be able to keep a fairly large workload within reasonable bounds. It relates to my earlier theme day idea: don’t regard all the work that comes pouring in as one huge mass that has to be done right this minute. Map out priorities for the work, identify due dates, and schedule or delay tasks out in front of you, fairly close to the times when they’re due.

The reason I felt theme days were not going to work is that I’d failed to break free of the feeling that everything has to be done right away. Faced with two rafts of papers, page proofs for a large and challenging publication, a steady tattoo of new documents to edit from a client, a mountain of laundry, a filthy house, parched house plants, a garden in need of attention, a pool ditto, and an especially busy choir week, I started to panic.

The truth is, though, not everything has to be done right now. Recognizing that fact and putting it to work for you can go a long way toward freeing you from workload oppression.

Update: COBRA, RASL

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So yesterday I reported on the flap that arose over the COBRA discount, in which one of GDU’s sterling HR representatives told me that staying on the payroll until December 31 would make me ineligible for the discount on COBRA mandated under ARRAS, the federal stimulus plan. This would mean my health insurance premiums would jump from $26 to over six hundred bucks a month. Even with the discount, the cost will rise to $186, but since I’ll be paying more than that for Medicare, it almost looks affordable.

Not, of course, with almost zero income, but I’ll just have to forego food and other necessities, since at my age I can’t risk going without health insurance.

Well, the story gets better.

I managed to find an e-mail address for an actual human being at the downtown state employee benefits office, taking me outside GDU’s purview. Off went a query:

If my employment with the Great Desert University ends on December 31, will I be eligible for the discounted COBRA?

Here is the reason that I am asking this question:

The federal rule on COBRA premium assistance, posted at www.irs.gov/pup/irs-drop/n-09-27.pdf, says a person is eligible…

(1) who is a qualified beneficiary as the result of an involuntary termination during the period from September 1, 2008, through December 31, 2009, (2) who is eligible for COBRA continuation coverage at any time during that period, and (3) who elects the coverage.

However, at GDU’s “frequently asked questions about COBRA premium assistance” page, this wording appears:

Who is eligible for premium assistance?

A person is eligible for premium assistance if and only if:

He/she is eligible for COBRA coverage between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009

AND

The qualifying event that makes him/her eligible for COBRA coverage is a covered employee’s employment being involuntarily terminated between September 1 2008 and December 31, 2009.

The HR rep with whom I spoke yesterday told me that the first bulleted  point, saying you must be “eligible for COBRA coverage between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009” means that if I am on the payroll on December 31, that will disqualify me from eligibility for the COBRA premium assistance BECAUSE my health care plan will remain in effect on that day, and so, because I will still be covered by my plan on December 31, I will not be “eligible” for COBRA until the next day, January 1, and therefore will miss the deadline. She believes that as long as your plan is in force, by definition you’re not eligible for COBRA—you have to have been thrown off your plan to be eligible. That is, she is saying that as long as your health care plan still covers you, you are not eligible for COBRA and therefore if you are still on the payroll on December 31, you are not eligible for the COBRA discount.

Is that true?

The way I read the federal rule published on the IRS site, it looks like “eligible for COBRA continuation coverage” means only that you are enrolled in an employer’s health plan and that you are involuntarily terminated between 9/1/08 and 12/31/09. Is simply being covered by your health care plan on the day you are involuntarily terminated enough to disqualify you from the discount, if your termination date is December 31?

Thus I need answers to two questions:

1. Is it true that if I am terminated involuntarily on December 31, 2009, I will not be eligible for the COBRA premium assistance? and

2. If it is true that termination on December 31 will make me ineligible for the COBRA discount, will a termination date of December 30 leave me eligible for the premium assistance?

Thank you for any clarification you can offer. I would like confirmation of the answer in writing, since no one at GDU seems to be certain of these policies.

Shortly, along came this startlingly literate response:

Hello,

Anybody terminated involuntarily between 9/30/08 and 12/31/09 are  all included in the Stimulas.

Thank you,

[the correspondent’s name & position]

{Sigh} I don’t know whether to take the word of a person who thinks that “anybody…are” and who can’t spell or punctuate stimulus. But at least now I have something in writing to support my interpretation of the law.

Ah, but it didn’t end there. Yesterday, the story got even better!

To be eligible for the state’s payout for accumulated sick leave (RASL), you have to be officially considered “retired.” Since I’ve worked at GDU since the early Pleistocene, this benefit amounts to about $20,000 for me, to be paid out in three annual installments.

The way I understand it, this means you make an official statement that you are retiring (and you have to do this within two weeks of your termination day) and you start drawing down from the state retirement system or from your 403(b), whichever you’re in.

As usual making an exception of myself, I want to roll over the $130,000 or so that has accumulated in this plan into my large IRA, which is professionally managed. I’d like to do this a) for the sake of simplicity (fewer statements to handle, fewer bureaucrats to deal with) and b) so that all my money is managed by the same financial management firm.

In connection with this strategy, I’ve been told that to be considered a GDU retiree, you have to leave a small amount in your 403(b) fund. Although you can roll over most of the money, there’s some minimum amount you have to leave in the state’s custody. What that minimum is remains a mystery.

So while I was at the HR office receiving incorrect information about the timing of the ARRAS eligibility, I asked the same font of wisdom if she could tell me what is the minimum that has to stay in the 403(b) to maintain one’s status as a “retiree.”

Well, of course she hadn’t the faintest. She’d never heard of such a thing.

She advised me to call the RASL director at the General Accounting Office to ask about this. I’ve been in touch with this woman before, and in the past she’s been very helpful—she was the one who advised me that the story La Maya and I each heard from HR office on two separate GDU campuses, to the effect that if you’re laid off you’re not eligible for RASL, was wrong.

By the time I reached her the following day, I’d about figured out that everything the HR rep had said about COBRA was just so much B.S., and so I’ll admit there probably was an edge in my voice.

When I asked her what was this “minimum amount” I’d been told had to stay in my 403(b) account, she completely went off on me.

She said that if I rolled my money out of my 403(b) into my own IRA, that would “obviously” mean I was not retired and therefore I could not have the $20,000 the state owes me for back sick leave pay.

I asked her to please define what is meant by “retire,” since I didn’t understand how rolling money out of a 403(b) into another tax-deferred plan would cause you to not be retired. She could not or would not respond to that question, but instead informed me flatly that if I rolled anything out of my 403(b), she would send me a letter rejecting my application for RASL. She started yelling at me (!) that “you can’t have everything you want.” I was so nonplussed it didn’t occur to me to say I’m not asking for everything; all I’m asking for is what I’ve earned over the past 15 years of working 14-hour days, 7 days a week with no overtime.

She then demanded that I call Fidelity and TIAA-CREF, where my 403(b) funds reside, with any further questions. She said they had “hundreds” of representatives who have had experience with this issue and could confirm what she said.

It took an hour and a half to get through the punch-a-button mazes to reach humans at those two worthy organizations. TIAA-CREF has disconnected the line that used to reach a person, so that now all of its published telephone numbers take you to a barricade between its employees and the Great Unwashed. Finally I got a call from a guy I reached through an e-mail form on their website.

At Fidelity, the CSR and his manager had never heard of any such rule. They both said they couldn’t imagine how rolling your money from one tax-deferred fund into another tax-deferred fund would magically make you “not retired.” The manager suggested that the way to get around this crazy woman would be simply to make a small drawdown, as though I were going to take out payments to live on, until such time as she approved the RASL and the first payment hit my account. Then, he suggested, just go ahead and do the rollover. Once she’d approved the RASL, there would be nothing she could do.

He also suggested simply rolling over the first distribution into my IRA. He said there’s no rule prohibiting you from making a roll-over, and although Fidelity has to confirm with GDU that the person requesting a distribution actually is “retired,” there’s no way the GAO woman was going to know where the distribution goes.

At TIAA-CREF, the CSR was amazed and said he also had never heard of any such thing. He said, however, that when the request for confirmation of retirement status goes through to GDU, the form used to make that request does say where the distribution is going. So, he concluded, this woman would be able to see whether I was having the money put into my checking account or whether it was being rolled into another tax-deferred instrument. He recommended taking a minimum distribution, paying the taxes on it, and depositing the remainder into my Roth IRA.

This will mean I can’t consolidate my money from three tax-deferred instruments to one for at least three months after I leave GDU. It takes that long after the demented woman at GAO approves your status as a retiree and gives the go-ahead for the RASL payment for the first of the three annual installments to be disbursed. Since I probably am going to have to make drawdowns from savings to survive, this is going to add to the hassle factor immeasurably.

What a flicking nightmare.

Another fun day at Human Resources

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It’s probably my mistake. Most things are. Whatever, when I showed up yesterday morning at Human Resources for the required meeting for exiting retirees, I was told that the meeting wasn’t yesterday; it was Wednesday.

Now, I would swear the woman who made the appointment for me was on the phone when I had the calendar in hand, and that I said, as I always do, “Let me confirm that…” But maybe not. Maybe I wrote it down on Thursday and just imagined I entered it on Wednesday.

This created a double inconvenience: The pointless 44-mile round-trip trudge out there (where I have nothing to do other than pack up some more of my junk and haul it out to the car), and then, because they sent a packet of information through the campus mail, another pointless round trip in the next day or two to pick that up.

Swallowing my fury, I remarked to the woman at the reception desk that I had some questions that I haven’t been able to get answered. In the conversation that ensued, it developed that she was the very person who had made this pointless appointment for me—and, we may add, so far the only one who seems to have made some sense over the telephone. She was sitting at the front desk because, thanks to the layoffs, they’re so short-handed they don’t have enough staff to run the office properly. At any rate, she offered to answer said questions.

You understand: in dealing with HR what you get is a passel of information that you already know. Whatever they tell you is a) boilerplate and b) already on their website. But when you have a real question, one that isn’t answered on their website, they don’t know the answer. Consequently, they either tell you they don’t know and they don’t really know where you can find out, or they give you an answer that’s wrong.

For example, the last time I was out there (and I do mean out: HR’s offices are way to the south of the huge campus. It’s too far away to walk, and the parking lot is permit-only, so that employees have to pay to park there or take a chance on getting a whopping ticket)…the last time I was out there, I was told that the proposed December 31 canning day would get me in under the wire for the discounted COBRA.

Without the discount on COBRA, my health insurance premium will jump from $26 a month to something over $600. With it, the premium will be somewhat less than Medicare, around $185. Not really affordable, but at least attainable, more or less.

Yesterday the HR lady read the rules for the discounted COBRA closely (isn’t that a quaint idea?) and concluded that what I’d been told was wrong. My benefits actually have to have stopped before the 31st. So, she proposed, I need to ask the Dean’s office to can me significantly sooner. She suggested the 11th—arbitrarily, because some other disgruntled retiree had chosen that day at yesterday’s meeting.

I informed her that Social Security will not deliver a benefit check before the middle of February, even though it “starts” (snark!!) in January, and that they refused to “start” it in December so that I can get some money in my bank account in January, because I’m earning a salary in December that would trigger the 50 percent penalty for working while drawing SS. I pointed out that I will have a difficult enough time living for a month and a half with no income, and that there’s no way I can manage that for something like two months.

Then she decided I probably could get away with it by having them can me on the 27th, the date of the last paycheck of the month. But, she said, I’ll have to get the Dean’s office a) to do that (meaning I have to get that bureaucracy off the dime) and b) I have to get those people to state that I’m being terminated involuntarily (even though in fact what’s happening is they’ve arranged to have my contract stop then, and it’s entirely possible the government will argue that not renewing a contract is different from firing a regular worker).

Then I asked how I get my money out of the 403(b) plans to roll it into my IRA. She didn’t know. She said I had to call Fidelity and TIAA-Cref, and she did not know how to reach a human being at either outfit.

So I asked what is the minimum amount I’m required to leave in the plan in order to be regarded as “retired” over the next three years so that I can get my accrued sick leave payments, which are doled out over a three-year period. She didn’t know. She said I needed to call the state’s general accounting office.

I asked if benefits are taken out of our vacation pay, and if so, did that mean my health care insurance would be extended over the month or so of time for which GDU owes me. She said she believed that the health insurance stopped on the termination day, but she wasn’t sure. She called a payroll clerk up to the front, to discuss this question.

That woman said that the only thing that was taken out of back vacation pay was state and federal taxes, but that the federal tax bite would be 25 percent, and that your benefits stop on the day you are terminated. I asked why the tax rate was so high. She said that was just the rules. Then she said the state tax deduction would be over 30 percent, because that’s what I put on my A-4 form. (I did? Well, that explains why I keep getting such large state tax refunds). I said that would mean they would be grabbing over half my pay!

She said no, by “30 percent” she meant the state takes 30 percent of the federal tax. Then she said it was possible to elect a slightly smaller bite. I said I would like to do that. So she produced a new A-4, which is the same as a W-4 only for the state of Arizona. The lowest amount I could select was 21.1 percent.

By the time I walked out of there, steam was shooting out of my ears.

These developments—assuming they’re true—represent substantial more hassle, substantial more uncertainty, and four fewer days of pay: $960 less than I thought I would get!!!!!

The bright spot is that I’ll net a little more in vacation pay than the $3186 I expected: $3670. Not much—$486 less than the $960 I’ll lose by moving my termination day forward—but better than yet another hit on the head.

Moving on, I tried to contact the college’s business office manager, cc-ing my dean, and was told that she’s out until next Monday. So now all this complicated mess has to hang fire until then, and then hang fire still longer until she gets around to answering me. By then I will have forgotten some of the details and also will be engaged in dealing with other messes.

Today, whenever it gets to be business hours, I’ve got to track down the woman I found at GAO and find out just how little cash I’m allowed to leave in the 403(b) without losing my RASL payment.

Then, somewhere, somehow (I have no idea where or how) I’ve got to find someone who understands enough about COBRA to confirm or deconfirm whether I really have to sacrifice $960 of pay in order to keep my health insurance premiums in a range that I can even remotely afford to pay.

What I don’t understand is that, assuming the HR lady is right in thinking I have to be off the payroll before December 31 because my benefits would extend to that day, why can’t I be canned on December 30, thereby losing only $240 worth of pay? The rule says “eligible for COBRA” and the last day on which you may have been canned is the 31st.

She interprets “eligible for COBRA” as meaning not only that you were canned involuntarily but that your benefits have stopped. In her view, because my benefits would still be in force on the 31st, and because GDU will have to not pay me for the extra four days after the December 27 payday until the first payday in January 2010, those two things together will make me ineligible for the discount. I don’t think so: I think the rule says you may have been canned as late as the 31st. If she’s right that hanging onto my job until the 31st makes me ineligible for the discount but letting them can me on the 27th makes me eligible, then by that reasoning (if “reasoning” it can be called), I should still be eligible on the 30th. IMHO, I should be eligible on the 31st, but I’m willing to forego $240 (less tax, less benefits, less every other gouge GDU can think of) to keep my insurance premiums “down” to a mere $186 a month.

So far, I’ve been unable to find anyone, anywhere who can explain this rule. Most of the HR people barely know it exists at all, and they certainly don’t understand its fine points.

Jayzus Aitch Keerist on a crutch! Is it any wonder I’m grinding my teeth until they break?

Facing unemployment: The emotional effects, the business consequences

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By way of handing off her classes to me, the community college instructor for whom I agreed to play substitute while she’s out of town came over to my house with a pile of lesson plans. Let’s call her La Maîtresse (the teacher), for her extraordinary enthusiasm and her creative approach to the often routine first-semester freshman composition course.

After a long conversation with her, I came away feeling a lot better about the pending loss of my own job. Like me, she also is a state employee: she works in a key agency downtown. Like me, she also is being canned after a long tenure—almost thirty years! And like me, she also was presented with a protracted “winding down” period. Don’t know how much advance notice they gave her (my staff and I had nine months), but her hours have been cut to 50 percent FTE and she soon will be working 0 percent FTE. She’s teaching for the same reason I am: to cobble together a survival income.

Centrally located state employees don’t think much of the Great Desert University’s leadership, of its employees’ financial and procedural competence, or of its president’s motivations. She is not the first to express a certain dubiousness about these issues.

Speaking with someone who’s an old-timer in one of the central nodes of a government agency is always revealing, and our conversation was no exception. For one thing, when I related the story of the identical misinformation La Maya and I got from HR officers on two different campuses about collecting accrued sick leave pay (RASL), she remarked that this sort of thing meant the higher-ups were instructing the CSRs to dispense misleading palaver. As you may recall, we were each led to believe, on separate occasions, that a layoff would mean we could not collect the important RASL benefit unless we retired before the university terminated our contracts. This, as it developed, was untrue.

An eligible state employee (one who has 500 or more hours of accrued vacation pay) has two weeks after termination—any termination, whether layoff, resignation, or even firing—to claim the RASL benefit. You do this by submitting a form stating that you’re “retiring,” even if the real reason for leaving state service is not voluntary retirement. Miss the deadline, and you forfeit the benefit: the money reverts to the state agency. La Maîtresse pointed out that where GDU is concerned, our money would go back to the university. This is not an inconsiderable figure: over $25,000 for La Maya; about $20,000 for me. Because the two-week window is rigid and allows no appeal, if you were misled long enough and convincingly enough, you could easily miss your chance to collect your back sick-leave pay. If enough terminated GDU employees believe they’re ineligible for RASL, the university retrieves quite a large sum from monies set aside to pay this benefit.

That’s a level of paranoia that rises even beyond mine, which orbits just above the stratosphere. But is it paranoia? One wonders: it comes from someone who is very much in the know.

She also said she finds less and less to do on her job, a source of great dissatisfaction. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else is having the same experience and reacting to it in a similar way. At this point my team and I have almost nothing to do. I hate this: it makes me feel lâche—like some kind of slacker. Ever since Her Deanship told our client editors, at the start of July, that our office would close in December, they’ve almost stopped sending us work. On the one hand, that’s just fine with me…I have an allergy to work, anyway. But on the other, I don’t like collecting a salary in exchange for precious little.

I dislike it so much that it’s a significant source of stress. In the tooth-grinding department, I rank it right up there with worry about how to get by without a salary.

It was reassuring to learn that I’m not the only one who a) is anxious to start something new; b) questions the goodwill of GDU’s upper management; c) isn’t doing much on the job. Apparently it’s normal for people who are being laid off to experience resentment, anger, loss of self-worth, outright fear, and finally loss of interest in the work.

Because of these predictable emotions, I would argue that keeping staff members through a long “winding-down” period is counterproductive for the institution. In my case, for example—and evidently in La Maîtresse’s case, too—the longer the parting has strung out, the more disconnected from my job I feel, and the more alienated from my soon-to-be-former employer. Three months ago, if GDU had closed my office and then, on the spot, offered a lower-paid but benefits-eligible job elsewhere in the bureaucracy or offered to farm our work to us on an outsource basis, I might have accepted. Now, I wouldn’t touch it. In fact, even though the university pays PhD’s significantly more for teaching adjunct courses than the community college district does, I’m no longer interested in picking up courses from any of the university’s four campuses. Despite the district’s lower pay, from my perspective the community college pasture looks a lot greener just now.

Surprisingly little research has been done on this subject. The 1994 report linked above was inconclusive, and it conflicted with at least one other contemporary study. Here’s a more recent study that’s pretty interesting, if you can get past being characterized as a “victim.” We’re not victims, any more than a fish is a victim of air because it absorbs oxygen through its gills. We’re unemployed workers who, for one reason or another, are not ready to quit working. The same site published a more lightweight report on the long-term negative effects to employers when lay-offs are used to address short-term challenges. The very issues we’re seeing in my case and La Maîtresse’s—plummeting morale, distrust of the employer, and alienation from the job—are mentioned here among factors that undermine the institution over a very long term.

In our talk, it became clear that both of us are more interested in moving forward with new projects and building a new life than we are in dragging out the last few weeks and months in a job that’s a losing proposition. When I’m at the office, I have to force myself to sit still in front of the keyboard: I simply no longer care about doing any work for that outfit. Yes, I’m grateful for the extra months of pay…but the point I’m making here is that expecting disaffected employees to hang around after you’ve caused their lives to implode is as counterproductive for the institution as it is harmful to the workers.

It will be a long time before GDU recovers from the investment losses it sustained in the collapse of the Bush economy and from the often malicious funding cuts inflicted by a hostile, retrograde, and desperate legislature. But it will be even longer before the university recovers from its leadership’s own ill-advised administrative strategies.

No wonder community college faculty women dress like a million bucks

by

The other day while I was attending the Paradise Valley and Phoenix College adjunct orientation meetings, I felt like a country bumpkin, in my Costco jeans and old B’Gauze no-iron cotton tunic. The faculty women there were dressed to the nines, in expensive-looking suits and separates with notably handsome shirts, and sporting pricey-looking haircuts and dye jobs. I was dressed to work in the garden.

Well. There’s a reason for that. Sunday I came across an ad for a new hire in English at Glendale Community College. Starting pay for someone like me—with a Ph.D. and 15 years of teaching experience (to say nothing of 20 years of real-world experience)—is $80,631. Yeah: starting pay. On a nine-month contract. Today I earn 15 grand less than that on a twelve-month contract. On her nine-month contract, La Maya, who is tenured and one of her college’s heaviest-hitting grant-grabbers, earns about $2,500 more than I do.

And when I was teaching at GDU, I earned about $43,500. If you prorated my present hourly pay over 9 months instead of 12, I’d be earning a grandiose $48,750, which is about what I’d be earning if I’d stayed as a full-time nontenure-track lecturer at the West campus instead of moving into a 12-month quasi-administrative position on the Main campus.

It’s not like the teaching load was any different. GDU’s full-time adjunct slaves teach 4 and 4, with writing courses capped at 30 (although one semester the department gave overrides behind my back and I ended up with 42 students in a technical writing course). Full-time community college faculty teach 5 and 5, but at PVCC (for example) writing classes are capped at 25.

4 classes x 30 students = 120 students
5 classes x 25 students = 125 students

Huh. So five more students means a $31,881 raise in pay, eh?

No wonder those women dress like a million dollars. They don’t have to wear dungarees and washable pullovers from Costco! They can afford to buy decent clothes.

I feel like a chump. I should have applied for every. single. opening the District advertised from the day I walked onto the West campus, punch-drunk from a divorce and thrilled to have a job, any job.

Takeaway message: Never consider your job permanent. Start looking for something better from the moment you’re hired. LOL! Especially if it looks like the competition’s people dress better than you do!

😛