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furloughs

“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.

Should I apply for unemployment?

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The Great Desert University has been approved for an unemployment insurance program called Shared Work. Basically it means that furloughed employees can collect unemployment for the unpaid furlough days we’re being forced to take off.

On the surface, it looks like a good idea. But there are some potential drawbacks.

First, unemployment eligibility has been extended to 59 weeks, which is about 14 months. That’s good. Because…this Shared Work program uses up your unemployment eligibility. Between now and June 30, we’re required to take 12 days—that’s 2 1/2 weeks. There’s no guarantee that GDU will not continue this furlough business into the next fiscal year; in fact, most of us think it will be used to engineer a permanent pay cut. If you use up your unemployment one day at a time, by the time you really need it to buy groceries, you could find yourself with little or no unemployment money left.

Many more layoffs are coming. First you get the furlough, then you get canned. It may be better to defer unemployment for the time when you really are unemployed.

Too, this looks like a huge hassle. To get regular unemployment, you can apply online. In Arizona, the Shared Work Program requires you to fill out a hard-copy form and physically file it. And since no one knows when you’re likely to quit or be laid off, it’s logical to think that you couldn’t apply for a whole chunk of projected furlough days. Likely you have to fill out and hand-deliver a form for each and every day.

The amount of weekly unemployment I would get under the best of circumstances is tiny. If and when I’m canned, I’ll need every penny I can scrounge up. If in fact you have to fill out and deliver a hard-copy form every week that you’re furloughed, it may not be worth the hassle to collect the minuscule amount I would get for one furlough day, and, since my position is nontenurable and very much at risk, it may be a bad idea to jump the gun on collecting unemployment.

Should I grab the money and run, taking a chance that I will not be laid off? Or wait and see?

And did I mention we were through the looking glass?

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Funny to functionary in business office, re: furloughs:

SK [Sidekick] and I would like to ensure that each of us takes our furlough days on different days of the week, to be sure someone who is not a grad student is in place at [Our Spectacular Office] at all times. To accomplish that, here’s the plan I would like to suggest:

I take each payday between now & the end of the current FY as the furlough day. This is 11 days. I will need to see how much one of these things actually reduces my take-home pay before deciding when to take the 12th day, as I will have to figure out where the survival money will come from. This will probably happen while the weather is still cool enough that we don’t have huge air-conditioning bills.

SK may then take the Thursday of payday week off, if she would like, or any other day in each pay period. Similarly, SK will need to figure out how she will make ends meet before deciding on a 12th day.

The only question we have about this is the effect the lagging pay policy would have on using the payday itself as the furlough day. As far as I can figure, there are 11 paydays between now and June 30, because the July 2 payday actually covers a period that ends in June. Is that correct?

I hope this strategy is acceptable to the Dean’s Office. If there’s any problem with it, please alert me so we can adjust accordingly.

Functionary to Funny, re: furloughs:

There are actually 12 pay periods in the furlough time. It began this week. You will be able to figure out approximately how much it will reduce your take home pay if you take 10% of your pay and subtract it from the total pay. (one day of each pay period is 1 out of 10 days or 10%) If you and SK, start this week, then you have 12 pay periods and you will not have to have any check with 2 days missing. Does that make sense?

Thank you for being conscious of the fact that it is important we have coverage in your office at all times. The College appreciates that.

Heh heh heh heh heh heh…you betcha!

You understand: We get paid on July 2, a day earlier than normal because July 3, a holiday, falls on our usual payday. We have what is known as “lagging pay,” meaning our paychecks cover periods of varying distance in the past. No one who is human has been able to figure out a rationale for this system, which makes exactly zero sense.

M’hijito once explained lagging pay to me, pointing out that, among other benefits for the employer, it amounts to a way to short you for paid vacation time at the time you leave a company’s employ. It was all over my head, so I didn’t understand a word of what he said. But I’m quite certain that whatever its effects, they’re not in the worker’s interest.

Last year our mid-July paycheck was issued on July 18 and covered June 30. That would suggest this year’s scheduled July 17 check will also claim to cover days in the prior fiscal year.

What this means is that even though the furloughing is supposed to stop at the end of the fiscal year (June 30), we still get our pay docked in not one but TWO paychecks in the following month.

Meanwhile, we still have only eleven pay periods of days (22 weeks) that we will work in the current fiscal year. If we take a day off between July 1 and July 17, we’re taking it off in the next fiscal year. The only way we can squeeze 12 furlough days into eleven pay periods is to take two days in one pay period.

Actually, you’re allowed to take part days. So you could, in theory, divide one day in four and take 1.25 days off in four pay periods.

Isn’t that cute?

caterpillar

Illustration from Alice in Wonderland by John Tenniel

Furloughed! Parboil the fruits before canning?

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Well, I found out about it from NPR news first, while driving home through the interminable rush-hour traffic: every Great Desert University employee is to be furloughed between now and the end of the fiscal year, June 30. When I raced in the house and pulled up my e-mail, yea verily, there was a message from Our Beloved President, outlining the plan to balance the university’s budget on its employees’ backs.

Administrators are being zapped for 15 days—that’s three weekswith no pay! Classified staff, which would include my associate editor, who earns less than she was earning as a graduate research assistant, get off with a mere ten days. And everyone else—that would be moi—will face 12 no-pay days.

Apparently we’re being allowed to string it out over the rest of the fiscal year; 17 1/2 weeks. The particular configuration of the furloughs, though, depends on one’s supervisor’s whim. So, for me, if they allow me to to take off one day a week, that would cut my pay by two days for each paycheck—$480—between now and the end of the fiscal year. Assuming, of course, that I last for the rest of the fiscal year.

Think of that: a $480 pay cut. Thank you so much, Georgie Porgie and all your doctrinaire ideologue puppeteers!

We can, we’re told, claim unemployment insurance for the unpaid days. Unemployment in Arizona is pretty piddling—a tiny fraction of what you earn. And it’s such a hassle to claim it that if you have any other source of income to fall back on, it’s hardly worth bothering.

Our bread-and-butter client just e-mailed asking if we’ll take on not one but two new projects. You betcha, sister!