Furloughed

So, with all the budget cuts facing the state and the university system, all university employees are being affected by a mandatory furlough. Depending on your position within the university you have to take 10, 12, or 15 days of unpaid leave between now and June 30th

At first I was told that I would need to look at my calendar, pick my 10 days and submit them for approval. this was very hard to do considering I am extremely busy and travel quite often during the spring and in order to not lose too much money in any one paycheck I really needed to sign up for one furlough day per pay period. I plan my calendar so far in advance that I certainly have a couple weeks together where I am out of the office completely and cannot take time off which means I would have to take more than one furlough day during a couple pay periods and be a little poorer during certain times.

Now, they have come up with a new plan. they are calling it "voluntary reduction in pay" but basically is says, you can choose to have your pay reduced by 10% every pay period and then work out with your supervisor when you take your furlough days. So now my pay reduction isnt directly connected to when I take my days off, but i still get the days off! So now I can take a week long vacation in April with 5 furlough days instead of using a combination of furlough and vacation days.

so being the optimist that I am I consider this a lot of extra vacation days. yes I will lose money but since it will come out of my paycheck routinely it won't feel like a loss (and it means I only lose one day's worth of pay during the week I use 5 furlough days at once!!!!)


yay for time off!

PS: I am not terribly worried about getting laid off for a couple of reasons 1) I work in the revenue generating department at the university 2) there are only two recruiters for all of southern arizona and the other one left - so I got a lot of added responsibility and seem to still have my head above water. 3) there is a hiring freeze and they can't replace the people who have left. If I was laid off there would be no one to replace me and my region is too big to go unrecruited.

I love my job :)