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Noses to the Grindstone, boys

The company I work for just updated some "policies":

  1. [redacted] has decided to eliminate the (2) [paid] personal days that we
    previously provided.
  2. [redacted] has decided to schedule (2) Unpaid Days Off during 2009,
    May 22, 2009 and December 23, 2009.  [redacted] will be closed on both days and no
    employees will be paid for those (2) days.  Employees are not permitted to use
    vacation days on those two selected days.  In the event, you are required to be
    on a skeleton crew during one or both of those days, another day within that
    week will be selected as your Unpaid Day.
  3. Vacation for all employees will be maxed out at (4) weeks per
    year.
  4. To conform to industry averages, sick days will reduce from (7)
    days to (5) days per year.
  5. Employees are expected to work an additional (3) hours per
    week.

 Of course all this was pitched as an alternative to cutting pay. Ahem. I would say forcing 2 unpaid days off, eliminating 2 paid days off, and eliminating 2 sick days certainly does amount to cutting pay, albeit in sheeps clothing. My computations go as follows:

52 weeks a year times 5 days a week equals 260 work days a year. A total of 6 days have effectively been removed, while 3 hours have been added a week (another 7.5%), so altogether that yields a pay cut of about 9.8%. Pile that on top of the 4th year of a pay freeze and we're all down a total of 17.8% minimum if you assume a measly 2% cost of living pay increase every year. And of course if you had "earned" more than 4 weeks of vacation, you lost a lot more. I just love corporate management spin. No paycut, woo-hoo!


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