Coffee heat rising

layoffs

Is this worse than we think, even?

by

What a day!

Before I even parked my purse in the office, I made a run on HR. There I learned a) they don’t know how much COBRA will be; b) the state just posted a page showing the new COBRA costs, but they’re telling staff not to tell anyone about it (says a lot, doesn’t it?); c) yes, they have to pony up the so-called “extra” pay that will have accrued by the end of December, which is supposed to be paid in the January “extra” paycheck (snark!); d) they don’t know if I get dibs on any internal hires that may be happening, given my status as an exempt year-to-year contract worker; e) the maximum number of vacation hours GDU will pay me for is 176; and f) I probably will be eligible for unemployment benefits.

ohhhkayyyy…. Moving on…

Back at the office, I get on the phone to my passing acquaintance at the General Accounting Office, the one who informed me that HR’s reps were full of beans when they told both me and La Maya that we lose our RASL (more about which, onward) if we’re laid off instead of announcing unilaterally that we’re retiring. Clear it was that this woman was no friend of GDU’s Human Resources bots, and so I felt fairly confident that she would not rat on me for inquiring about exactly what Our Beloved Employer was trying to accomplish by secretly changing my associate editor’s job status from a nonexempt classified to an exempt contract worker…and trying to faze past me the idea that her offer letter for a classified position amounted to a “contract” for a “we can squash you anytime we please” job.

My Spy’s first instinct was that nonexempt workers are hired to be present for X number of hours, and exempt workers are hired to accomplish a job, no matter how long it takes. Thus, if they dump all our graduate student assistants and leave us with six (!) journals to take from manuscript to the compositor, they will not have to pay her overtime for the obscene number of hours she will have to work beyond the number for which she is paid.

Hmmm…good thought, said I.

And, said she, it’s a lot easier to get rid of exempt workers.

Yeah. Don’t I know it.

Moving on, Spy advised that I should be very careful to figure out exactly what is the hourly rate for the new contract OBE proposes to emit, come June 30. She pointed out that RASL—a kind of severance package based on the number of unused sick leave hours a state employee has accrued—is based on your hourly pay at the time you leave state service, not on the amount you made when you were being sort of fairly paid. Quite a few retiring workers, she reported, have been rudely surprised to learn that by accepting a pay cut instead of furlough days, they cut this retirement benefit significantly.

RASL is a feature that pays you for accrued sick leave, based on your years of service. You accrue sick leave separately from vacation time, and it builds rather slowly. After you’ve racked up 500 hours, you’re entitled to be paid about 30 percent of your hourly pay for each hour of accrued sick leave, at the time you leave your job. When you hit 1,000 hours, glory be! As your parting gift, the state forks over 50 percent of your hourly rate for each hour of accrued sick leave. This money drifts up because it is contributed to a state fund from your salary.

Well, I have almost 1,200 hundred hours, presently worth something over $17,000.

Spy pointed out that if they reduce my hourly pay with this new contract, it could drastically affect my RASL. So drastically, she advised, that it may be worth turning the contract down and walking if what they offer in June is a pay cut. She advised carefully figuring how much my RASL is worth at my present rate of pay and being prepared to calculate, quickly, how much I would lose if I accepted a pay cut.

So: add that task to the mix. And add to it another layer: figure out how to get by if I have to quit at the end of June instead of hanging around until the end of December. Gaaaaahhhhh!

Now Spy waxed garrulous. This is one of those government employees who knows how to function within and to operate a bureaucracy because of long, long service. Just listening to her made it clear that she’d been around forever. She remarked that she had several friends with over 30 years of service to the state, and that among them all, no one could remember anything remotely like what they’re seeing now. She said people are demonstrating in front of their office buildings and having sh*t-fits in the lobby, but all anyone could say to them is that there just. isn’t. any. money. left. to. pay. out. Staff can’t help, because they have nothing—literally nothing—to help with.

More spookily still, she observed that some people are beginning to talk seriously about the possibility that the state government could completely shut down. Not just close the prisons and the universities. No. Shut down everything. Go out of business.

After that conversation it took some hours to get a grip, and I will say, at this moment it’s still a pretty tenuous grip.

Back at the office, Her Deanship commanded another audience. Tomorrow I have to go in prepared to discuss which RAs will get the ax first, and which of our client journals will go away in what order. Took half the afternoon to compose a memo responding to that and to argue in favor of retaining our lead RA through the fall semester.

Just as I was wrapping up that little gem, said lead RA showed up and asked, “Am I going to be here in the fall?”

Oh shit.

So, I had to close the door and explain to her what is happening. By the time that discussion was over, I’d been clenching my jaw so violently I’d brought on a muscle tremor.

Her department has lost most of its graduate student support lines. There were nine lines to support 26 graduate students. They are now all distributed. OBE delayed so long in dropping the ax on our department that this exceptionally worthy mother of two has now lost her chance at any other assistantship. It’s not like they didn’t know. I mean, please! How many times has Her Deanship put me off since last freaking August when I have told her we need new client journals? Five? At least. I’ve sensed for weeks that the reason for the stonewalling is that she knew we weren’t expected to survive and she didn’t want to commit our services to faculty members, only to have to yank the rug out from under them.

Just another manifestation of the basic fact of academic life: a university’s administration does not give one thin damn about the welfare of its students.

In an attempt to get a good word in for my associate editor, I spent two or three hours laboring over the STUPID annual evaluation form, an enormous time-waster. Anyway, assuming Her Deanship accepts it and passes it along to HR, if the sidekick applies for a new job at GDU anytime in the more or less near future, a rave review will be sitting in her permanent files.

My jaw hurts. I’m going to go put a heating pad on my face.

Yours in eternal awe of Our Beloved Employer,

—Funny

Staying solvent in penury

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At last! The FIRST GLIMMER OF HOPE in the past 24 hours of number-crunching.

If my figures are right, after I’m booted out into the financial snow I can continue to pay toward the Investment House mortgage, continue to live in the outrageous style to which I have become accustomed, and not go broke. The trick is to earn about $13,500 a year, the amount a good part-time job around here pays. I would need to net $938.75 a month and add it to Social Security and 4% of surviving investments to pull this off.

My arithmetic skills are so wobbly that I had to add up a year’s worth of income and outgo to figure this out. Here’s how:

The amount I’ve used to represent monthly expenditures shows the highest monthly utility bills of the year. But the power and water bills drop by more than 50% in the spring and fall. The working figure also includes a $170 payment on the Renovation Loan, which I can easily pay off, dropping that monthly bill to 0.

It occurred to me that with the pending much-reduced income, I could create a “pool” account much like the one I fund now with biweekly paychecks. But because so little money would go into it and the demands of daily costs are so high, the initial “grubstake” would need to be much larger than what I put in to start my present, much better-funded pool.

My current pool account was bankrolled in the amount of one paycheck, which at the time was about $1500 (it’s significantly less now, thanks to the furloughs). What if instead of funding this new “pool” in the amount of a paycheck, I grubstaked it in the amount of an entire year’s net income, $22,500? I have more than half of that laying around the credit union right now, and if I pick up two classes between now and the end of December, I could easily come up with the rest. So, on January 1, I deposit $22,500 into my “pool” checking account, scrounged from present savings and future earnings. That becomes the account’s “cushion.” If unexpected repair bills or the usual astronomical summer utility bills outpace my income, the 22.5 grand will more than take up the slack. In theory, over the winter when bills are much cheaper, I should catch up.

First I added subtracted each month’s typical bills from each month’s balance (the previous month’s balance plus Social Security plus investment income plus a proposed amount of earnings), assuming I netted $1,000 a month from freelance fees or part-time jobs.

Lordie! The result is I live like a queen, never dip into the red, and end up $2,090 to the good at the end of the year.

Well…I don’t exactly live like a queen, but at least I don’t suffer a significant drop in my already modest standard of living. I get to keep putting $200 a month into a fund for unexpected expenses and indulgences, and, best of all, I have no problem paying my share of the Investment House mortgage.

Next, I repeated this 12-step process assuming I earned only $500 a month. This left me $5,265 in the red at year-end. To estimate how much I might need to break even, I divided $5,265 by 12 months and then added it to the $500 monthly extra income. This suggested I would need just under $939 a month to run in the black.

Since my math cannot be trusted, I ran an empirical experiment to see if this was accurate: plugged $939 into the 12-step process. And by golly! This scenario produces a surplus of $3.00 at the end of 12 months.

This is the first time I’ve run a set of figures that make it appear I won’t be taking up residence in a tent city after I’m laid off. With three potential income streams, it should be pretty easy for me to net around $1,000 a month. These activities will force me to get out of the house and interact with some live humans, which can’t be bad. And who knows? It may lay the groundwork for a full-time job after age 66, when the government stops grabbing back your Social Security just because you still have something to contribute to the workplace.
w00t!
$$$$

Ax falls but…uhm…bounces?

by

Okay, folks. Hang onto your hats.

They gave me NINE. MONTHS’. NOTICE.

That’s right. I’m canned, but in the slowest of slow-mo.

They’re closing my office, but pretty clearly because they’re nervous about the faculty’s response (which will be stentorian), they’re “phasing it out.” They’re going to renew my contract at the start of the fiscal year (July 1), but only for six months. The editorial office is now slated to close in December.

My suspicion that they converted my assistant editor’s job from classified (nonexempt) to service professional (exempt)—behind my back, and without telling her—so that they could more easily can her was dead on. Classified staff must be given first dibs on any openings for jobs comparable to the one they’re being laid off from. This means there’s one job like it coming open and they want someone else to have it.

Dollars to donuts, that little maneuver is illegal: for a contract to be valid, both parties need to sign it, eh? I don’t think you can switch a person from a classified job to a contract job without bothering to let her know, which is what they tried to do. The only reason I found out was that a woman who either wasn’t too bright or wasn’t any too friendly to what they were up to telephoned and let me know. My sidekick now is aware—through me—that her job classification has been changed, but she’s never been offered a contract. Our business manager said that our offer letter isher contract, but the offer letter, as I recall, was for a classified position, not for a service professional’s contract.

I understand that lawsuits against Our Beloved Employer are sprouting like fancy mushrooms in Room Farm’s closet.

For me, this could work out well. Nine months will give me plenty of timeeitherto look for another job (ugh! not bloody likely) or to figure out how to extract a living from several income streams. The possibilities for Bumhood are rife:
– Monetize Funny about Money
–Market and expand The Copyeditor’s Desk
–Put together the two books I have in hand, and sell the things
–Line up a few university or junior-college courses to teach
–Find a part-time job
–Get Social Security started
–Bunch up all my savings and start drawing down 4%, Bush economy be damned

The beauty of this is that my health care insurance is now covered. Nine months’ notice will carry through until the end of December, 2009. I turn 65 in May of 2010: only five months later. The cost of COBRA is being cut, so that the amount I will receive in vacation pay will easily cover five months’ worth, after which I’ll be eligible for Medicare. Six weeks’ worth of vacation pay will cover five months of COBRA and then some: I’ll have cash left over.

Medicare may cost more than the new, reduced COBRA, which could represent a problem. But I’ll deal with that when I get to it.
* * *

A huge typhoon of a windstorm is roaring around outside. Stuff is banging against the exterior walls and thumping down on the roof. Poor little Cassie, who’s scared of wind (she apparently thinks it has something to do with the supernatural), has been locked inside for eight or ten hours, and now she won’t go out long enough to do her Thing.

She was trapped interminably because I left the campus at 6:30, got stuck in perfectly hideous late rush-hour traffic, had to get off the freeway and make my way 15 miles across town on jam-packed surface streets. Went by M’hijito’s house to tell him what’s up; he took me to dinner, so the Cassie wasn’t rescued until after 8:30 at night.

This morning I took my unfortunate client’s corrupted file out to the powerful PC on campus and to my amazement contrived to save it. The computer actually broke into the defunct file! It tried to crash when I hit the corrupted table, but by then I was wise to things and had saved changes. Next time the file opened, I managed to surgically excise the suspect material, and from then on the thing worked OK.

I had to rebuild 2/3 of Author’s twenty-sixtables, some of them very complex. It took hour after hour after endless hour, wrapped around a meeting in which I was told I soon will be out on the street. The upshot of it is that even though I saved the client’s job and will get paid (I hope…), I’ve earned something less than minimum wage for my trouble. Oh well. It’s enough to buy a month and a half worth of groceries, so I’m not going to complain. Much.

A layoff strategy

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On our morning walk, La Maya asked if I have a come-back planned should Her Deanship announce, during this afternoon’s unexpected audience, that the Great Desert University intends to lay me off.

As a matter of fact, I do. Several recessions ago in a galaxy far, far away, I happened to read a magazine article whose author argued that as soon as an employer proposes to lay you off, you should immediately come back with an alternative. The theory was that you can sometimes bargain yourself into a better position, or at least gain paid or partially paid time to search for new work.

Unclear whether this idea remains operative in the more extreme conditions we’re seeing today. But nothing ventured (etc.). So, I have a couple of come-backs:

1. Her Deanship says soooo sorry, we’re laying you off. I say:
Last night on the local PBS news program, a legislator said that a string the size of a rope is attached to the stimulus package Our Beloved Governor has asked the president for. To get the stimulus money, Arizona will have to abrogate and reinstate all the outrageous cutsto higher education(well, as one of the lead budget-cutters, he didn’t use the term “outrageous,” o’course). Therefore, in the next few weeks the university’s budget will be restored and all your programs can proceed as before.

So, why don’t you cut my hours by 50%, temporarily? This would save on benefits and taxes, and half of my gross salary would cover the cost of one research assistantship—including the out-of-state tuition waiver. Then, when things are better, you can reinstate me at 100% FTE.

2. Her Deanship says that will never do! I say:
Rather than yank the College’s support out from under not one, not two, but six scholarly journals (causing bad press for GDU not just locally but nationwide that will ring through the ages like time’s endless echo), why don’t you outsource the preproduction services to me? This will save the university the cost of my salary plus taxes and benefits, remove three research assistantships and a 50% FTE assistant editor’s position, and get the job done at enormous cost savings.

Pull that one off, and The Copyeditor’s Desk has a bread-and-butter client that won’t quit. Tina and I will both be self-employed, which has its disadvantages but also has the advantage that we won’t have to schlep to campus. We can farm the work out to the graduate students on a freelance basis. While we can’t give them research assistantships, we certainly could hire one a semester as an intern, given what we would earn editing six journals plus the other work we’re doing.

Mwa ha ha! No wonder I’m an academic. I was born for this kind of bullshit!

Reviewed the financial strategy I’d already planned for the layoff eventuality. It’s going to be very tight. However, if it’s true that the stimulus package will pick up 60% of COBRA, my back vacation pay will cover COBRA until I’m eligible for Medicare, especially if the university keeps me on until the end of the fiscal year (June 30). Also, $2,400 of unemployment is now tax-free, so that means the pittance Arizona dispenses will be a slightly larger pittance.

So, I guess the main reason I’m not feeling very exercised about this development (besides the fact that I’m tired of thinking about it) is that, although it would be a major inconvenience, if they lay me off my world will not come to an end.

Uh oh! Watch this space…

by

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.

Layoff Poker: Will the bosses tip their hand?

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Here’s a development: The brand-new director of our sister program, who hasn’t a clue but who does have a six-figure salary and commensurate clout, e-mailed to ask what our office could provide by way of assistantships or internships for her graduate students. What openings, she inquired, would be available over the summer and next fall?

{cackle!}

Well, o’course the answer to that is Heaven only knows, ’cause no one on this earthly plane does. But the realpolitick response was what a choice opportunity!

So naturally (oh, so naturally), I forwarded her query to Her Deanship with a disingenuous inquiry of my own: If all three of our research assistants stay through the summer and one stays on in the fall, may we hire two new RAs in the fall? If not, may we hire one new RA in the fall?

I love it! This foists the untoward question onto the new kid. And, well…New Kid being who and what she is, such a question coming from her pretty much demands an answer. It’s even within the realm of possibility (just within it) that she could command a straight answer. More or less.

E-mail forwarded to Deanship under a cover note, I rare back and watch.

Pretty quick, along comes a fine nonanswer: “I’ll check.”

This means Her Deanship will confer with her boss, His Vicepresidentship. One of three answers will issue forth. Here’s what they are, and here’s what they mean:

“We don’t know” (possibly phrased as “that decision has yet to be made” or “we’re still trying to figure it out”): This means “Don’t hire anyone, because you ain’t likely to be here much longer.”

“We can’t keep the present RAs over the summer but will (or probably will) hire one or two new RAs in the fall”: That one translates to “we are flat broke and we hope the students to whom we committed ourselves for 12-month contracts are not the litigious type; however, we expect your office will be in business after federal funds start to come in. Assuming any such funds do in fact materialize.”

“We will commit unequivocally to hiring new RAs in the fall”: This unlikely response will mean “your office assuredly will continue to exist despite the layoffs.”

Now. None of these means that the office necessarily will continue in business with me in charge of it. There is, after all, a classified position of managing editor, for which any number of graduates of our sister program would be eminently qualified. Starting salary for such a being: about half of what I earn. However, given the nature of institutional inertia, it’s probable that as long as the office survives, my job will survive.

Heh heh heh heh heh… Watch this space!