The publishing business is shut down Christmas-New Years. When I worked for a major book retailer, they still made up come in and work, even though certain of us whose jobs interfaced significantly with publishers could get absolutely no work done.
Plenty of companies shutdown for a week or two around the holidays, one government contractor I worked for even did.
I’m sure that the people on the finance side will be working plenty of extra hours during the shutdown to see if they can find a way to get out of the mess – or would you rather have them sitting at home with their families as well? If those guys are in, their support staff will have to be as well, and from there it spirals until you have most of the white collar types working. Of course, these people, accountants and techies and engineers are all evil types just trying to keep the worker down, right? They don’t actually do anything do they? They certainly don’t care about the long term prospects of the company, and are just trying to exploit the worker, right?
I work in publishing, and the last two weeks of December through the first week of January, while we don’t say we’re shut down completely, it’s pretty hard to get anybody on the phone.
It’s kind of the same in August. For some reason a lot of people in the publishing industry take their vacations then.
I work in private industry and we get just that.
My husband is laid off for the next two weeks, if not more. He works for an auto parts manufacturing company and was told to be by the phone every Thursday from 9 am to noon from January 2nd on. Great. What kind of crap is that? ‘Wait by the phone every Thursday. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. No, we won’t send you a letter. Just wait by the phone and maybe you’ll work again by the end of January. Or maybe not. Merry Christmas!’
I don’t make enough to pay the bills. It will take a while for unemployment to kick in, and even then it won’t be enough. This should be fun.
If they are like my company , chrysler gives em a list of what they need for the next month and then the company management derives the labor list for that period. Usually its full up operations, but in our case we start up on january 5 (monday) with shipments to three plants that are still operating,but to be fair these may be GM shipments , I never asked.
The following week , we go to a possible five plant shipments, but they left in language saying that we could be laid off beyond the first two weeks. So they want your phone free so they can be dynamic with labor flexibility.
Just to let you know , they have also told us to expect more sporadic layoffs in the coming year, which may be the same as your husbands place.
Declan