Just when you think it can't get any more wretched

[randy_byers]

It has just been announced that all budget cuts and layoffs at the University have been decided, "but there are technological problems within the Human Resources Office that are so severe they have not been able to move forward with the decisions." This whole situation makes me angry and sick to my stomach. It's bad enough that none of this is

Comments

[daveon]

Ouch. Hopefully this won't affect you at all?

[randy_byers]

I don't think I'll be one of the lay-offs.

[don_fitch]

Arrrghh!

(Hoping that that, from a third party, helps. There's usually _some_ consolation when aggrivation is shared.)

Sometimes I wonder about the motives of The People Who Run Things, when they develop "solutions" to what's basically a problem of excessive unemployment that include firing a lot of people. Perhaps especially when the people fired/laid-off are almost all at the lower-pay levels. But then, I don't expect that "Reduce salaries, starting with the President, Congress members, Governors, & State Legislators, by at least ten percent" would go over any better than "increase taxes on anyone with an income of over $100,000 per year by 3%, with no loopholes". *sigh*

Mind you, I've always admired Skinner's idea (in _Walden II_) that (Governmental & private) Executives' salaries be fixed in relation to the median income of the populace/workers. And yeah, it _is_ possible that I'm a Closet Socialist of some weird flavor.

[randy_byers]

I was definitely thinking more of the geniuses on Wall Street who got us into this mess with their "creative" book-keeping -- e.g., the Gaussian copula.

[wrdnrd]

"Technological problems with human resources"?? That smells almost like bullshit. Yes, i CAN see that there are technological aspects to preparing someone for layoff within the HR system. At the same time, could they at least TELL people so they could, oh, I DON'T KNOW, prepare??

We already know how it's affecting our office: a woman who is retiring next june is (a) not being replaced, and (b) has dropped down to 60% time for these next 12 months. You can imagine our office's collective reaction when the division VP announced that his division had somehow escaped unscathed and had taken "no cuts."

[bovil]

It's usually not bullshit. It's also usually not the technology, but the implementation.

It's usually an old HR administration that's gone that didn't want to enter data into a new system and now it's a bunch of manual work to find out the sort of information the system could just spit out if lazy people had done their damned job.

Our HR department has a real problem definitively determining who has seniority under what conditions, and retreat rights complicate the situation, but the main problem is just under a decade ago our HR director didn't want to do more than she absolutely had to, and 2 years ago that started causing problems.

[wrdnrd]

Oh, i'm definitely aware of some of the technological limitations of HR here. For one thing, for a long while (not sure if this is still the case) they simply could not determine how many years an individual had been employed -- and not even solely in tricky cases where someone may have left and returned or may have changed status, but in simple cases too where someone was hired and had never left.

I also know that "technological problems" is not a 100% accurate description of current problems here WRT to layoffs, because i'm aware of people who have been definitively told already that they are getting laid off. When i say i smell bullshit i'm not denying that there are probably technological problems within HR -- i AM saying i don't think that's THE reason some people haven't been told they're being laid off.

[randy_byers]

Yeah, I don't know if you heard that Marc L retired at the beginning of the month, after having been reduced to 50% in the last budget cut. As for the politics of uneven application of the cuts, best I bite my tongue.

[smofbabe]

My sympathies to you and your co-workers. In high tech, if your company is publicly owned, no shareholder is allowed to know insider information before any other shareholder so once the Board decides on layoffs, they have to announce that fact immediately. However, it can often be *months* before they actually work out who is being laid off and prepare the necessary paperwork. It really sucks to have the sword hanging over your head. (One year this happened over a period that included Christmas, which made it suck even more.)

[randy_byers]

The process has probably taken months here too, although most of that was the state legislature figuring out the state budget and figuring out whether the four-year schools would be allowed to raise tuition rates as much as they wanted to. We've known the whole time that cuts were coming, we just didn't know how big they were going to be. Now we apparently know exactly what the cuts are going to be, but we can't say. It's a good thing I don't have any hair left to pull out.

[holyoutlaw]

Argh! Teh suck! Hope things improve.

[randy_byers]

Yeah, not sure what it will take for things to improve. Probably jacking tuition rates through the roof and/or admitting a lot more out-of-state and foreign students, unless the state decides it wants to support higher education again.

[kalimac]

I was an out-of-state student at UW my first year. After that I'd established residency and was allowed to pay as in-state. Of course I was a grad student, not an undergrad. Does it still work that way?

[randy_byers]

The law was changed a few years ago to make establishing residency while you're going to school more difficult. I believe if you are taking six or more credits you are considered to be in the state for educational purposes and cannot establish residency, or something like that. (Don't quote me on the details.)