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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.

Moments of Fame

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OMG! If you think PF bloggers have no fun, you have got to see Broke Grad Student’s Carnival of Personal Finance, which just went live. There’ll be no topping this one! Absolutely positively do not miss the “Guitar: Impossible” video. Well…no: don’t miss any of them.

Amazingly, Funny’s rumination on job happiness hit the top of the Editor’s Picks, for which I am awed and delighted. Today’s round-up is awash in original and well written articles. Check out Pimp Your Finance’s charming, clever, and wise What Would Bilbo Do? 14 Money Lessons from The Hobbit. The Strump rang my bell with Millionaire Bag Lady—been there, don’t ever wanna do that again! Your Money Relationship talks about how long to keep tax documents, always a conundrum for those of us who itemize and who have limited space to store mountains of paper. Single Guy Money has succeeded in staying off tobacco for a full month, a major accomplishment that we all hope leads to even longer success.

Gotta race out to a meeting. Be sure to visit the Carnival for leads to lots of other great posts.

Food Futures! Three-month stash grubstaked

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The plan to store and keep on hand three months’ worth of foodgot fully under way with a day-long voyage to every food and junk emporium within driving distance.

A week ago, M’hijito and I picked up the freezer at Costco, and he helped get it out of the vehicle and into its place of honor. Yah, I know: would’ve been cheaper to buy it off Craig’s List. But that would have a) entailed traipsing 30 or 40 miles across the Valley and b) left me with an unknown quantity. For a reasonable price—two hundred bucks—I got a brand-new unit with a warranty from a retailer that will take practically anything back.

Next steps were to estimate about about how much I would need to create a three-month stash of food and necessities, and then to reconnoiter to see how much was already on hand. I created an Excel list of all the storable supplies I could think of and estimated (sometimes wildly) how much would be needed for one month and how much for three months—the one-month guesses because there’s no way I can afford to buy all of three months’ supplies of everything I use from day to day. Here’s a PDF of the result.

A check of the refrigerator’s freezer revealed a surprising amount of meat—over a month’s worth. Of late I seem to be eating less and less meat, partly because in the absence of a gas grill it’s more trouble to cook than it’s worth. My stash was heavy on pieces of steak and light on fish and chicken, so I decided to pick up some of those at Costco, where both are already packaged for freezing.

Based on how much I already had in the house, I made a shopping list in Word showing how much of each item was needed to supply one month’s needs and how much for three months. Some items were likely to be found at more than one vendor: some things Safeway carries, for example, might be cheaper at Target or Food City. And some items that I would like to buy in lifetime supplies don’t appear at Costco: demerara sugar (shown on my list as “crunchy sugar”) is one such. In those cases, I listed the possible sources in separate columns. Then I had Word sort the table first by Vendor 1 and then by Vendor 2. This grouped all the things I needed to purchase by the stores where I thought I could find the stuff.

And then it was off to the high seas of commerce! M’hijito, having nothing much better to do with his time and needing to go to Costco anyway, joined the expedition as sherpa-in-chief. Thanks goodness! I don’t know how I would have hauled all the junk myself, or even stuck with the plan: it was 2:30 in the afternoon before I got home, and I’d left around 9:30 in the morning.

Surprisingly, this enterprise cost nothing like what I expected. I’d planned to spend about $500 for the initial grubstaking of the project. But the grand total of charges from Costco, Safeway, Sprouts, and Target came to $375.36, only $75 more than my usual weekly budget. I still have to buy gas, which will cost about $25—but that’s still only about $100 more than I normally spend every week trotting around to supermarkets and big boxes. For that amount, I got a full month’s supply of food, and then some.

But the truth is, the food alone cost significantly less: about $322. As part of the junket, I bought a number of nonfood items: storage jars, baskets to organize goods in the freezer, antibiotic ointment, trash bags, sponges, seeds for the garden. Three hundred and twenty-two bucks is not bad, for putting in up to three months’ of food.

Now we’ll see if this works! Can she stay out of grocery stores?

jul8yarnell1It would be ideal if I could cut trips to grocery and box stores to no more than two a month, after a first-of-the-month stocking-up foray. Because I have some produce growing in the garden—chard, lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, herbs—this just might work. It would be like living in Yarnell, my sun-parched brain’s idea of Bali Hai: clinging to the edge of the Mogollon Rim, you couldn’t very well drive 60 or 80 miles one-way to buy a few convenience items, and so you’d learn to make do between monthly expeditions.

In addition to the obvious savings from simply staying out of stores and having to plan each shopping list carefully, I believe that storing up a cache of food and household supplies, which undoubtedly will grow as the months pass, will create a hedge against the inflation we can expect to come down on us with a vengeance. Whether that happens or not, at the very least it will be a safety net in case of a layoff, or against the time when I retire and see my income drop by about 60 percent. Any way you look at it, this appears to be a good idea.

“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.

Money, dollars, numbers, stress

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Math is just not my thing. No: correct that. Arithmetic is not my thing. I can hold my own with algebra, geometry, and even trig. But adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing? The stuff drives me to despair. Under the best of conditions, reconciling my bank accounts makes my gut tighten up. The tiniest stupid mistake can result in an hours-long struggle with numbers, which sooner or later lose all semblance of meaning other than that they represent one huge stress attack.

The credit union made a mistake in a statement for one of my checking accounts. A $1,522December deposit somehow got added into the January figures, pushing the opening balance way out of whack.

I traipse the December and January statements in to the credit union, where Shibu, one of the personable bankers who hang out there, says not to worry about it: don’t change the opening balance in Quicken but just enter the ending balance and then clear everything that actually has cleared. Oh…and…uhm…by the way…. when the Great Desert University’s furlough scheme cuts my paychecks, the fact that the figure doesn’t jibe with the amount I’ve been transferring will negate the automatic transfers I’ve been making, to shift funds into a different account. So, says he, henceforth I’ll have to make those transfers manually. All the other electronic funds transfers (which depend on that first transfer being done on time and correctly) will continue as usual.

Huh? say I. The amount I’ve been transferring is less than the amount of the paycheck, and there’s a large cushion in that account. GDU could direct-deposit a grand total of $5.99 and the regular transfer would not bounce.

Well, says he, it’s just because the incoming amount is different.

I go away, think about this, and return the next day. After hearing my argument to the effect that there’s no good reason a change in the amount of incoming cash should change the amount of outgoing cash as long as the account has plenty of money, Shibu agrees to set up a transfer that’s independent of GDU’s direct-deposited paycheck. The credit union will henceforth transfer $1,522 every 15 days. This should roughly coincide with GDU’s payday schedule.

Makes me nervous, because I sense that nothing will coincide with GDU’s anything, since the place is through the looking glass. However, I say OK and stagger back out into the sunlight.

Today I sit down to reconcile the cockamamie account. In the process, I go online and check what’s in that account. And what do I find but that the credit union transferred the reduced GDU paycheck of the 13th, which came in about $140 less than the normal figure. Nooo problem.

But waitaminit… $1,522 is now supposed to go over into the other account, too. And that will empty the first account, probably bouncing EFTs.

I’m doing another furlough tomorrow and working from home today. Don’t want to make a 30-mile drive just to rattle Shibu’s cage some more. On the other hand, I can’t afford to bounce utility payments. So, it’s onto the telephone lines, where I reach a clueless call center employee who tells me Shibu doesn’t have a telephone, because there are no incoming telephone lines to the credit union’s branch offices.

Amazing, how stupid they think we are, isn’t it?

Anyway, after long discussion, this worthy realizes he isn’t up to the task of figuring out what I’m trying to say. He calls Shibu, who several hours later calls me. Not to worry, says he: the first $1,522 transfer isn’t scheduled to happen for two weeks. It will then supersede the paycheck transfer. As a parting gift, he reveals the number for his direct (nonexistent, we’re told) telephone line.

WhatEVER. And, furthermore, we’ll see about that.

I feel a gigantic screw-up looming in the darkling woods. You can smell these screw-ups, sense them coming a mile away. Something is wrong here, and when it outs, it will really out. Payments will bounce, creditors will threaten, my hair will be torn.

Mark my words.
😉

“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.