Coffee heat rising

Workplace issues

Uh oh! Watch this space…

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So I sneak out early this afternoon, planning to play hooky tomorrow, and upon arriving back at the house around 3:00 p.m. check the e-mail. What do I find but a summons to an audience with Her Deanship tomorrow afternoon!

Sumbitch. What is that about?

You can be sure that Her Deanship does not waste her time in idle chat with the likes of moi. She has never called me in to her office except to harangue me about one sin or another. Since she’s unlikely to have caught me in my chronic Creative Malingering (she’s not watching, you understand), this does not bode at all well.

Now, I know. I do borrow trouble. Borrow so much of it I still owe interest on years of accrued trouble debt. And it is true that my co-conspirator over in the Public History Department and I have been importuning her for weeks to say if and when we can hire RAs to replace the two who will make their escape this summer. So, yes, there’s a good chance this concerns nothing very drastic.

BUT… But: today I learned the Dean’s factotum…uhm, business manager…quietly reclassified my sidekick from a nonexempt hourly worker to an exempt service professional. The HR lady who revealed that bit of intelligence was surprised I had not been informed. This represents a huge change in my assistant editor’s status, and it adds a great deal of potential versatility to the position. As in…she could be used to take over my job, at less than 1/5 of what I earn.

Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

AND BUT… The university has to give me 90 days’ notice if they’re not going to renew my contract. Contracts renew at the end of the fiscal year, on June 30. That means their lead time runs out on Tuesday. If the dean is going to hand me a pink slip, now is the time she has to do it.

Is that what she’s up to? Maybe. Maybe not.

Shared Work Unemployment Insurance Story: It gets better!

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Okay, so this morning an HR rep called from the Great Desert University in response to my rant about Chase’s declining the debit card that came from the Unemployment Insurance folks. As you’ll recall, Chase was unable to disgorge the $48 the supposedly valid card supposedly contains.

You know, every time you think Big Bureaucracy gets as ridiculous as it is possible for the human animal to get, some bureaucracy outdoes itself.

My whine was the first complaint our HR rep had heard about this, but apparently it’s not going to be the last. In the course of discussion, she said the problem no doubt is that the card contains no payment, even though we’re past the week-long waiting period and past the second furlough pay period and so I am now eligible to start receiving Unemployment Insurance payments. This is because the university so far has not received the forms from UI that it must fill out and return to make the payments start happening.

Furthermore, she said, she was horrified to discover that the Department of Economic Security (DES), the state office that administers Unemployment Insurance here, is not online. When she was asked to send required information on all of ASU’s furloughed employees, she offered to send an electronic file.

No, she was told: they have no way of receiving electronic files. They have to enter all the information the old-fashioned way: legions of data-entry clerks punch in every number and character, copied off of hard-copy documents. They made her FAX 199 pages of data! Those FAXes contained employees’ names, Social Security numbers, earnings, and other private information.

“Well,” I said, “Now we know where we can get jobs after we’re laid off!”

“Yeah,” she said, “if you want to be a data-entry clerk at DES!”

By the time we finished laughing about that, the implication of what she had said soaked in.

“They are typing all that stuff to disk? That’s going to take weeks!”

“You’d think so. I mentioned that to them,” she said. “They assured me it was no problem. Why, they said, they had just finished entering the data for a casino that laid off its employees, and that was 800 people.”

“Uhhmmm….”

“Yeah. I pointed out that GDU is not a casino…that we have 10,000 employees who are signing up for Shared Work.”

“My god.”

“She said not to worry, they would hire new people to do the work.”

“But the state is laying people off in every department!”

“That’s right.”

Anyway, she concluded that Chase must have declined the card because there’s no way it could have any money on it. She was amazed to learn that the teller could not access the account to see how much (if anything) it contained. But because there is no way DES could possibly have entered data for 10,000 of our employees yet, the most likely explanation is that they sent an empty debit card.

And chances are, none of us will see any of this money until after our furloughs are over and we’re receiving our full pay again.

We all live in a yellow submarine Monty Python Show.

Unemployment + Chase Bank = Hell on Wheels

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LOL! I just KNEW it!

As you may recall, my beloved employer, the Great Desert University, did its level best to ameliorate the pain of the unpaid furlough days it’s forcing us all to take by entering a Shared Work arrangement with the Unemployment Insurance Service.

This sounds great…on paper.Reality is a slightly different matter.

Although UI will, in due course, direct-deposit your money to a bank account of your choice, the first payment defaults to a debit card with Chase Bank.

Can you spell sweetheart deal, boys and girls?

I don’t use debit cards; I don’t want to use a debit card; I just want to get the $48 that allegedly has been deposited to this card out of Chase Bank and into my sweaty little paws, so I can carry it to the credit union and deposit it to a savings account, where it and the promised future direct deposits can sit until we see whether I get laid off or not. So, here’s what happens when I try to extract said munificent sum:

Dear ASK HR:

The debit card from Chase came in the mail, issued in response to the request for Shared Work payment for furlough days. I called the phone number on the information that came with the card. After about 15 minutes of jumping through punch-a-button hoops, I validated the card and got the access number and the PIN number.

 

For a number of reasons, I do not use debit cards. I have a credit union account, to which I asked to have the payments due me direct-deposited. Yes, I DO understand that the first payment cannot be direct-deposited. So now I have $48 on this debit card, which I would like to extract from Chase and manually deposit, in person, at the Arizona State Credit Union.

 

I drove to the nearest Chase branch. It is in a dangerous part of town where I would not ordinarily get out of my car—it is, shall we say, a lock-your-car-doors district. Stood in line interminably at the teller’s. Explained the situation, asked to withdraw the $48 that is supposed to be on the card. Jumped through some more hoops. And then what? She informed me the card was rejected. By now I’ve spent another half-hour dorking with this, for a total of 45 minutes.

 

Now she wants me to go to customer service, where I will be asked to dial the phone number on the card (which is the same punch-a-button hoop-jump number that has already fruitlessly consumed a quarter-hour of my time). I explain that I have work to do, and that the last time I called that number, there was no option to reach a person.

 

Back at my own phone, I dial a number for Chase listed on GetHuman.com. Eventually, I reach a person in the auto loan department. He connects me with a human being: in Pakistan or India!

 

Okay. After waiting 16 minutes to get through to this person, I explain the situation. He says he will connect me to a person in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I explain that even though Unemployment Insurance is a federal program, in the U.S. it is administered by each state separately and that each state’s system is different, and so it will not do me any good to talk to the Illinois unemployment people. That notwithstanding, he insists on giving me a number in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I hang up in frustration.

 

This little runaround has now occupied a good hour and a half of my time, not counting the time used fruitlessly to call a phone number at HR whose talking machine hung up on me before I could explain the issue. Nor does it count the 90 minutes spent sitting in a meeting listening to ASU and Unemployment Insurance representatives explain how to work the system, nor does it count the time I spent filling out forms.

 

When I’m working at ASU, I’m paid about $30 an hour. Thus, it has cost $45 worth of my time at ASU’s rate to try to extract $48 allegedly due to me. To make things more interesting, my actual, real-life freelance rate is $60 an hour. So, the truth is, I have now spent $90 worth of my time in an effort to retrieve $48 that has already been paid to me but which Chase will not disgorge.

 

I’m going to give up and write off the $48—I just don’t have time to kill this way. However, I would like someone to know how furious it makes me. I do not like to have my time wasted, and I especially resent being barred from retrieving unemployment insurance that I have paid for with my taxes and my employer has paid for with its taxes.

 

HR’s effort to cut through red tape and ameliorate the pain of the furlough days was a very good try and much appreciated by those of us who feel worried about our jobs and beat-up by the economy in general. However, it appears your time was every bit as much wasted as mine was. If a human being reads this message and has any clue how to reach an English-speaking human being at Chase (NOT another punch-a-button machine, NOT a foreign national who has no clue what I’m talking about!), please advise.

Don’t you love it?

Truth to tell, the exploit in the sub-working-class neighborhood where Chase directed me to its closest bank was as nothing compared to the misguided junket to our neighborhood Albertson’s, where I incorrectly thought the branch was located (they did used to have some branch bank in there, but it’s gone now—I won’t go into that store because it’s unsafe, and so I’d not noticed the bank’s removal). Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR cop cars were lined up in front, a couple of them left with their engines running. Inside, a gaggle of police officers were huddled with a guy who pretty clearly was a vic’ and not a perp. I surmised that he must have been robbed or at least pounced in the parking lot. Charming. Asked after the bank branch and was told to proceed deeper into the slum. And so, onward and downward.

Let’s calculate how much the futile effort to retrieve my $48 really has cost.

Time consumed:
90 minutes: sitting in an informational meeting, filling out forms
15 minutes: navigating punch-a-button phone lines to validate debit card and obtain various secret numbers
30 minutes: driving to Chase branch and being repulsed
20 minutes: reaching a human being on a Chase telephone and being repulsed
15 minutes: writing the diatribe above
TOTAL: 170 minutes, or 2.83 hours

Value of my time as a GDU employee: $30/hour
Value of my time on a freelance basis: $60/hour

Value of time, at taxpayer rate, wasted while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me: $84.90

Value of time, at freelance rate, wasted while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me: $169.80

Tell me: is there anyone out there who doesn’t believe we’re living in a Monty Python show?

Word from On High: Stay Calm

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Yesterday the Deans tried to do a little damage control. The six of them called a “town hall” meeting of academic professionals and other underlings in related nebulous positions. The conversation was pretty interesting, and I (for one: possibly the only one) came away slightly encouraged.

To understand the subtext, you need to know just how precarious the “academic professional” or “service professional” position is. These are full-time jobs that,even though they’re nontenurable and usually ill-paid,are considered quasifaculty positions. Some are nine-month (academic year) and some are twelve-month (fiscal year) appointments, but in either event incumbents stay at the whim of the administration. APs are exempt, meaning the bosses can fire you at any time, for any or for no reason. Tenurable faculty cannot be canned for nothing, and neither can classified (nonexempt) staff, for whom dismissal requires a supervisor to go through the tortures of the damned. Thus, academic professionals hold the university’s single most vulnerable full-time job. APs include librarians, program directors, certain researchers and instructors, and various oddments such as graphic artists and editors.

Before the current president acceded to the throne, some APs were theoretically tenurable: these worthies had “continuing” contracts, as opposed the more typical year-to-year renewable contract. A year-to-year renewable means the university issues a new contract annually; a “continuing” contract is effectively permanent. As a practical matter, the search process is so cumbersome and such a hassle that most people on year-to-year renewable contracts, afloat on institutional inertia, hang onto their jobs as long as anyone else. But of course, a continuing contract is much to be desired.

Not surprisingly, most of the layoff rumors blowing through the halls have focused on academic professionals. The libraries have stopped acquiring books and have canceled all their periodical subscriptions, rendering librarians redundant—quite a few of them have already been canned. Starting in the middle of last summer, we have heard volley after volley of theories to the effect that some or even all service and academic professionals will be laid off. And, not surprisingly, morale among this group is at an all-time low; fear and loathing, at an all-time high.

The overall gist of the deans’ remarks at yesterday’s meeting was uncertainty. They admitted that they didn’t have a clue, but, while warning that more cuts are pretty much inevitable in fiscal years ’09 and’10, they said they saw “cause for cautious optimism.” They insisted they are doing all they can a) to shield students from the worst effects of the disastrous budget cuts, and b) to minimize staff cuts to the extent possible. Those brief statements made, they opened the floor to questions. Videlicet:

What will happen if a state of financial emergency is declared?

The Board of Regents is the only entity that can do so. [This conflicts with the university’s rules and regs pertaining to employees, which specifically state the university president can declare a state of emergency.] The deans do not believe this will happen in FY 2010, and the FY 2009 disaster has now been wrestled into a “manageable” state.

Will the furloughs continue into FY 2010? Or will they morph into a permanent salary cut?

No, and no. The furloughs created massive administrative headaches, leading the deans to conclude that “furloughing is not a good way to do things.” [Roger that, bosses!] They urged staff to keep in mind that our college plays such a crucial part in the university’s mission and operation that it has “a privileged position.”

Will the satellite campuses be closed?

Not likely. However, the College’s vice-president (i.e., our Dean of Deans) remarked that it would be preferable to shut those campuses than to damage services at the main campus.

About three weeks ago, the questioner, an instructional professional with a continuing contract, received a notice from the vice-president for personnel stating that her contract would be canceled and replaced with a year-to-year or even possibly a semester-to-semester contract. Other APs have not received any such message. What’s the deal?

The deans are discussing the issue with the Provost’s office. They are resisting this move, because they wish to retain APs [who do much of the College’s scutwork]. If the College is forced to dismiss a lot of adjuncts—or if many of them seek work in the community colleges or the business world—we will be forced to close our doors. To retain APs, the university is doing all it can to increase funding. Our funding sources, which include tuition revenues [especially from out-of-state students, who pay exorbitant rates] and external funding grants, are up. Tuition revenues are up; retention is up. One-third of the university’s revenue comes from tuition.

That’s great, but what about contracts for academic and service professionals?

What is on the table are six-month or semester-to-semester contracts. We will not know what comes of this until April. The Deans are not included in the discussion. The administration wants more “flexibility.” They want to be able to end contracts summarily.The service professional’s twelve-month contract, which requires a 90-day warning of cancellation, does not provide this. In April, all service professionals may be told that we will be hired from July through December of FY 2010. This has not been firmly decided, but it is certain that multiyear (“continuing”) contracts will go away.

Will changing the contract’s terms affect our benefits?

No.

The deans wrapped up the discussion by saying that although the worst is probably over, we’re not through the storm; some rough times are still ahead. Things will be clearer, they said, in six to eight weeks, mid- to late March.

Isn’t that sweet? In one breath they tell us the university’s operations depend on our underpaid presence, and in the next they tell us they’re about to remove the teensy bit of job security we had. Now, instead of not knowing from year to year whether we’ll have a job, we won’t know from month to month. In all their earnestness to reach out to staff and calm the waters, what they did was reiterate an old truth of academia: Universities subsist on exploitation.

We need a union.

Well, at least it appears that those of us who survive into FY 2010 will see our salaries return to normal. It also looks like there may be a fair chance my job will not be RIFed. To be OK in a premature retirement, I only need to hang on for another year. It would be ideal if I could stay in this job for another three to six years, but even a single year would suffice.

“Job Happiness”: The oxymoron of the century

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Recently a PF blogger held forth on a perennially popular topic, how to achieve happiness on the job. Sorry—I failed to bookmark the post and so can’t offer a link, but I’m sure some of you will recall reading it.

Coincidentally, shortly after that post went up, a friend whose research interest is the Latina experience in higher education (she tracks the progress of first-generation Hispanic women Ph.D.’s who stay in academia) told me about an article focussing on a particularly trying period that afflicted a campus where I used to work. Revisiting those events depressed me, but then, foolishly, instead of blowing it off I unearthed some ancient documents and e-mails that pretty much confirmed the article’s reports, a truly depressing exercise.

It’s hard to understand how any of us who worked in that place survived with our marbles intact. Matter of fact, several did not.

That one should quit one’s job and go somewhere else when one is unhappy is easier said than done, especially for academics. Jobs in higher education do not come along often, especially if your degree is in the liberal arts. Competition is fierce, even for poorly paid positions at podunk schools. It took me years—literally—to get out of that place. I applied for job after job, both in and out of education. At one point, I seriously thought of quitting and starting a housecleaning business.

Finally I got an offer for a tenure-track position. Given my three books in print and sterling teaching record, the department promised me a shot at tenure within three years. But: the job was in South Carolina, whose citizens occupied themselves by defending their right to fly a Confederate flag over the state capitol. It entailed a $10,000 cut in pay. The college provided a $2,000 moving allowance; three moving companies gave estimates in the $8,000 range to transport me across the continent.

The prospect of taking a massive pay cut and then forking up $6,000 to move, in middle age, to a part of the country where I knew no one and where the prevailing culture’s values would conflict with mine looked worse than staying where I was.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day and evening with another friend whose job truly does make her miserable. The operation where she works is so badly managed that the atmosphere has become toxic, and it’s hard to understand how its malignant supervisor has escaped notice from the higher-ups. My friend has decided to leave—wisely, I think. Even though she feels this is not the best time financially, her husband has a good job that is unlikely to go away and that will support them both. Eventually she probably will find something else, after she’s had time to recover psychologically and physically from the grinding experience she’s gone through.

She has put up with a great deal of suffering for a very long time, partly because of financial considerations, partly because (like any target of abuse) she has imagined her unhappiness is somehow her own fault, and partly because she doesn’t quit things lightly.

My take on this is that work is not called “work,” a job is not called a “job” because earning a living is intended to be fun. The whole idea that we can expect to enjoy our jobs may be utterly misguided. If work were fun, we would call it “partying,” not “working.” Clearly, some jobs are less onerous than others. And some people delude themselves that they are having great fun on their jobs. But most don’t.

It strikes me that “job happiness” is a contradiction in terms.You have to put bread on your table. You can’t always just quit because your job sucks.

How to deal with this? Several possibilities come to mind.

1. Find a way to become self-employed, so at least you have only one boss: yourself. Start a side job and quietly develop it into something that can support you, even if you have to cut your standard of living until you can get the business running. A friend of mine made a good living as a cross-country truck driver, but he imagined he should have a life. His coworkers scoffed when he quit his job to start a lawn business. Within a year, he said, he was earning more than he’d made driving big rigs and enjoying life a great deal more.

2. Or seek employment at outfits that do not actively abuse their workers.

3. Restrict the job to the workplace. Leave it behind when you walk out the door, and walk out the door on time. Do not work overtime, and do not take a job where you are expected to devote your entire being to your occupation. Draw a distinct line between “occupation” and “life,” and jealously guard your life.

4. In an unhappy job, do as little work as possible without risking dismissal. Perform the work you must do competently, but do no more than necessary. Take all your vacation time, engineering every three-day and four-day weekend you can manage. Keep a low profile, and get out of the place as soon as you can.

5. If at all possible, move to another job once every few years. Jobs that seem wonderful when you start soon grow old. The challenge of starting with a new company or building a new enterprise at least injects a little interest into the chore of earning a living.

6. Move up or move down. If what you’re doing looks like a dead end, find a way to tunnel out. To move up, take out a loan and go back to school; get training in something that will take you in a new direction. Or consider taking a lesser job, one whose sole purpose is to put bread on the table without requiring that you donate your soul to the devil. One man with a fine higher education, for example, discovered that his entire outlook on life brightened after hequit a career and took a job as a forklift operator.

7. Retire at the earliest possible moment. When your mortgage and your car are paid off, it is amazing how little you need to live on. Get out of debt; build a pile of savings; learn to live frugally; get yourself under an inexpensive, paid-off roof; divest your life of clutter (physical and spiritual); and quit working.

It’s important to build a divide between you and your job. You are not your job! Your value as a human being is not determined by what you do for a living or by how much you earn.Gettingthat concept into your head—and truly believing it—is the real basis for happiness on the job.

“Shared Work”: It has some advantages

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So this morning I made it to a ninety-minute presentation on Shared Work, the Unemployment Service’s plan to provide a modicum of compensation for people who are being furloughed instead of flat laid off. In a nutshell, if your employer cooperates you can get unemployment compensation for those days that you’re not paid on your job. Within limits. The scheme has some nice advantages over regular full unemployment compensation, but it retains a few of the old program’s drawbacks.

Plusses are significant:

You do not have to reapply for every week in which you have a furlough day. Your employer takes responsibility for informing the bureaucracy of the days your pay is docked. That cuts an enormous amount of red tape and hassle.

You are allowed to earn income from a second job or from freelance gigs without losing the Shared Work benefit. This is a sharp contrast to regular unemployment insurance, which boots you off the system if you get so much as a day of back vacation pay.

If you manage not to be laid off and if you earn enough to get by on your reduced salary, you could in theory collect the ten or twelve weeks’ worth of payments and stash them, plumping your savings account a bit or using the money to pay down debt.

Cons are also significant:

These payments bite into your regular unemployment compensation, in the event that you do get laid off. If you collect, say, $400 from Shared Work, your unemployment entitlement will be cut by $400. This means that if you’re in the financial position that too many state employees find themselves in—below or right at the poverty line—and you have to use the Shared Work payments to make ends meet, you will suffer when you’re laid off.

The payments are piddling. The max payment would be something like $48 a day, barely enough to buy a bag of groceries—given that you will take off one day every two weeks.

To be eligible, you must be furloughed for at least 10% but not more than 40% of a given week. This means that if you take as many as 20 hours of furlough time in a week, you don’t collect a penny. In other words, you can’t bunch several or all of the furlough days together to give yourself a little unpaid vacation. Take off 16 hours or more, and you lose the compensation.

The default mode of payment is a debit card issued by Chase Bank. The Unemployment Service’s spokesman warned, in no uncertain terms, that these cards have all sorts of strings designed to nick and gouge users, including limits on where you can use the things, how you can use them, and how many times you can use them. To get the government to direct-deposit the payments, you have to fill out yet another form (we filled out seven pages of forms today, including one that gave the gummint permission to examine all of our bank account activities). It takes two weeks or so to put your request in action.

As with regular unemployment compensation, you have to sit out a one-week “waiting period” after your first day of eligibility. This means you will not and cannot be paid for your first furlough day. So instead of receiving Shared Wages for 12 days, GDU employees will get it for 11 days. It smacks of another right-wing whack at the working poor, highly offensive in my view. If you’re unemployed for x days, you should collect Unemployment Insurance for x days, not for x – y days.

It certainly adds insult to injury. We’re the ones who are suffering from the shenanigans perpetrated by outfits like Chase, and now we have to pay the SOBs for the privilege of using our own unemployment insurance? That truly does stink.

But hey! Beggars can’t be choosers, eh?

Anyway, there it is. Better than nothing, I guess. Better than being canned now instead of later.

Update: It now begins to look as though at least the first payment from the Unemployment Insurance Service, a munificent $48 on $240 lost to a day’s furlough, may never be retrievable. Stay tuned for more entertainment.