My own company did this at the end of the year. Two weeks…take your vacation or take a loan on it. Luckily I had plenty of vacation time, so it didn’t hurt me, but some people already had vacations bought and paid for, and I think those people are a little pissed, but I still say it’s better than no job at all.
My place went from 40 to 32 hours for full-timers for Dec. & Jan. We were allowed to use our sick/personal or vacation days if we had them to supplement our income during that time. Didn’t really like using my vacation time up that way but I had to pay the bills. At the time it felt better than getting laid off, especially during the holidays/winter.
End of Jan. we were told our company (a subsidiary of a larger, well-known co.) is going out of business. We’re all still there as we prepare to close for good. We’ll be leaving in phases over the next months. 
I’ve been laid off before and it’s better with notice like this than being told you have to leave “now”. Gives time to regroup, send out resumes, etc. while the regular money is still coming in.
Oh yeah, now we’re back to 40 hours… gotta love the irony in that.
Technically we could transfer to the parent co. but they have a hiring freeze so, even if we wanted to go there which I definitely do not, we’re SOL. We would have to re-apply for our (similar) jobs and renegotiate our money.
With the “notice” and severance it’s possible that the economy could get a little better by the time we are out. Let’s all hope so… At least it will be spring.
Wow, I had no idea this was so common/widespread. Totally caught me off guard; I had never heard anything like it.
Well, after talking to my boss, it turns out that the person I heard it from misconstrued it. Apparently, in the meeting they were just basically reminding us how lucky we are that they aren’t doing anything like this and aren’t planning to; I guess we’re some of the lucky ones. At least for now. Though it doesn’t bode well that they are even bringing up shit like this in meetings. :[
City of Stockton has added ten furlough days. They get taken out of our paychecks at half a day per two-week paycheck, but the actual days are mostly clustered around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s voluntary, in that we voted to allow it. The accountants said it would save 17 jobs.
I had big family drama over the holidays, so the furlough worked very well for me.
The City has also laid off two Department Directors and demoted two Deputy City Managers. So the squeeze is hitting the top, too.
Another plan allowed folks to leave for a lump sum, which was calculated by salary and time on the job. This could be retiring early or just getting another job somewhere else. You forfeited your right to come back to your job within a year if you took the offer.
Any way to pinch pennies without decimating the workforce.
As long as you’re not in a contract that talks about hours, and as long as they’re not breaking any labor laws by making you work more than allowed by law, I don’t see any issue with lowering work hours. Just because I consistently work 40 hours, doesn’t mean I’m entitled to those hours. The company pays me for what they need. If all they need is 32 hours of my time, then it’s up to me to decide if I want to work those hours, or find another job that will give me the hours I require.
This happened to both of my brothers and my husband - they were reduced to 32 hours a week so that the company wouldn’t have to lay off any more people. We didn’t like it, but we got by. They’re back to 40 hours a week now.
A friend of mine works at a company with a strong work ethic and most of the staff have insane amounts of Annual Leave built up.
There have been some changes to the corporate structure and culture lately and they’ve had several people leave as a result, and they’ve had to pay thousands and thousands of dollars in annual leave entitlements to the people who left- a couple of them are entitled to payouts in the $10,000 area, for example.
So, they’ve started telling all the employees with more than a certain amount of annual leave that they have to use it to get it back down to a manageable level (around 6 weeks or so, I think). A couple of the staff are taking one day a week off as part of their Annual Leave, and it’s working out really well for everyone- they only have to work a 4 day week for the same pay, and there are now some temp staff working that one day a week to cover their shifts, so some jobs have actually been created by it. The reason the company can afford to pay temp staff is that the Annual Leave budget is a separate ledger to the Wages budget.
Not everyone is happy about it, but most of them realise that a shorter working week is better than no working week, and the staff affected are the ones with months of annual leave built up, so most staff aren’t really affected by it since they take annual holidays anyway.
The University of Arizona announced furloughs a couple of weeks ago, the University of Missouri did it this week and Southern Illinois University just announced yesterday they’ll be doing it, too.
Of course manufacturers have been shutting down their factories and furloughing the workers for a few days to a few weeks during slow times for decades.
California State employee here getting first and third Fridays off and a 9.23% pay reduction. The contracts with the state employee unions are all expired and they were able to impose it unilaterally. They are also dropping two paid holidays. Furlough Fridays are scheduled to last until April of 2010, but the terms could change in negotiations. The budget is $42 billion out of balance, and the state’s credit is one notch above junk bond status–the lowest state credit rating in the country.
We are not allowed to use leave to make up the difference. We’re screwed, but not as badly as lots of folks
Razorette and went through this at one of her employers many years ago – we still had young 'uns at home. We thought we’d be looking for part-time jobs to make up the difference, but as it turned out we learned to live within our reduced budget. Discretionary spending went by the wayside … as I recall we dumped cable TV, didn’t renew some magazine subscriptions, didn’t go out to eat, didn’t even see the inside of the mall for a couple of months. We survived it, and everybody still had their jobs, benefits, seniority, etc. when it was all over. Not so bad, all in all, and the experience has done us well, since we’re now facing the possibility of the same thing with her current employer – the State of Colorado. Fortunately, my job offers all the overtime I care to work, and I’ll probably care to work a bunch this winter and spring, if necessary.
Seems asked and answered, but yeah, generally speaking and as long as there’s no contract violation, all the DOL says is that you can’t work MORE than 40 hours without overtime being paid for non-exempt employees. That said, the wise employer goes to his employees and says “times are tough, you can each take a day off with no pay per week or I can layoff the amount necessary to make up the hole in our budget. What do you say?”
Why have they built up insane amounts of annual leave? Is it because they were too driven to take leave or because they were pressured by their employers that only sissies or those lacking dedication would even consider going on holidays? I know a lot of people who take little or no leave because of pressure from above.
A little of both, I think. And now it’s biting them (the company) in the ass, and rightly so IMHO.
I thought that was probably the case. Thanks. I have only nine weeks’ leave accrued but some colleagues have a lot more. They are unable to take leave owing to them because it’d leave the wards in a precarious place as far as skill mix is concerned. I don’t they’re planning to all resign, which is A Very Good Thing because NSW Health is broke.
At my company they give us too much. We have a lot of people who have been with the firm 20 years, and vacation maxes out at six weeks. Its hard for Americans (things are different in Europe) to even take six weeks of vacation. Many of the people with gobs of vacation are definitely NOT workaholics - and the isn’t a workaholic culture. Once you take your week over Christmas and two weeks in the summer and a day here or there, you still end up carrying a week or more into the next year. You max out on how much you can carry…
Wait till your the one thats fired. That will put a real crimp in your budget.
Or they could just make you work 40 hours still and drop your hourly pay to make up for the losses.
This just happened to my sister. She’s in advertising and her company’s main clients are in the finance industry. They’ll revisit the situation in June, but until then everybody is working a 4 day week and taking a 20% pay cut. She just bought an apartment, so this really couldn’t have come at a worse time.
It’s a small, tight-knit company, and while her colleagues aren’t thrilled, they do appreciate that the company is trying to keep them all on.
We have to take regular breaks as an unavoidable fact of our job. So what management started doing was jiggering schedules around so they could stick two of these breaks back to back, call it “lunch” and not pay anybody, even though 30 minutes isn’t NEARLY enough time to go get any food and eat it.
My company, and a lot of others, caps vacation buildup at about 7 weeks. I’m at 5.5 now, but not from pressure from above.
As I understand it, companies need to put money for accrued vacation in a reserve. Thus, even if people use vacation for mandatory leave, it comes out of the reserve and not out of payroll, which helps the books.
We’ve been doing this since the first of the year. Everyone (hourly and salaried) had their pay reduced by 9% and in recompense have recieved 24 “unpaid vacation” days in return; six per quarter.
More or less without a contract that prohibits this, employers are free to do this. At least they are here in Colorado.