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 happening because the University is performing badly, and that we are ultimately paying for the idiocy of the financial geniuses who run this country. Now they have to prolong the uncertainty because of technological problems? It's maddening.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

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

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

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

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[wrdnrd]

I'd heard that Marc was down to 50%, but i hadn't heard that he retired.

As for the politics of uneven application of the cuts, best I bite my tongue.

Yeah, i've said all i'm going to say in a public venue. This sounds like a job for some sake! ;)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's going to take a giant bottle.

[wrdnrd]

And, actually, i tend not to discuss University-related stuff in public venues anyway. So it'd have to be a giant bottle AND a private closet.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

This is beginning to sound like a comedy skit.

[wrdnrd]

That's the UW for you these days.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

Argh! Teh suck! Hope things improve.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.)

[wrdnrd]

There are a few things a person taking 6+ credits can do to still qualify for in-state tuition -- mostly "work 30+ hours a week at a job," which makes people about as happy as you'd expect.

The reason i got into the habit of not discussing University stuff in public is that Andy was always worried that if i got to telling residence classification anecdotes while we were out to eat, he'd have to leap into action to protect me when someone whose residency i denied attacked me with restaurant cutlery. We DID avoid the U-Village liquor store for years and years because someone worked there who not only was denied residence classification -- he ALSO came into the office and got so red-faced and angry about it that David was pretty sure the guy was going to blow and start assaulting people. Tho' perhaps David just made that up to have a reason for standing around prominently displaying his "guns".

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Working in residence classification was one of the toughest jobs I've ever had at the U, precisely because of how distressing it was to people to be turned down. The only other job I've had where I saw that many distressed people was when I worked in a hospital in high school.

[wrdnrd]

They hired me in large part because of my experience in financial aid at Cornish. I came pre-packaged with an unfeeling heart of stone! I'll admit that mostly i spent my time pissed off at people who would get angry that they couldn't just waltz in and get in-state tuition their 2nd year. There were a handful of times i felt genuinely useful walking students thru' the tedious, byzantine process. There was one time, however, when a student missed a key part of my explanation, thus failing to get residency, and i was so upset i put my head down on my desk and cried after she left.

Frankly, what drove me from the job more than anything was routinely getting yelled at by parents. My favorites were the mom and dad who got on 2 extensions at their house and tag-teamed me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's true that I did leave the state after receiving my degree, which may look like I was there only for educational purposes. But I didn't want to leave; I wanted to stay, and would have if I'd been able to find a job.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A nice illustration of how layoffs are just as hard on retained staff as on those let go. If you were to say that reactions to this news within your stomach were so severe that you are not able to move forward with your normal duties, no human being could blame you, which would be a brutally effective way of finding out whether your bosses are human beings or not.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Sorry about this. University sector just shit at moment.. if any help we seem to have got past that stage and now have 4-6 new appointments! What is the point..

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

If the cuts didn't seem so fucking pointless, maybe I'd be more sanguine. The fact that demand for our services has actually *increased* in the economic downturn makes the whole thing the height of perversity. Ah, rational markets!

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

I assume by "the financial geniuses" you include the fellows at JP Morgan who gave themselves a self-congratulatory lion's share of $10bn.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I never thought I'd envy Canada for its banking system, of all things.

[reverendjim.livejournal.com]

That all sounds depressingly like what's going on here. I hope it doesn't affect you too much.
I'd advise drinking fine beer.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Still no announcements. Plenty of fine beer. So you guys are taking big cuts too?

[reverendjim.livejournal.com]

Yeah. A combination of total change funding (fees from students rather than grant from government) and continuing fallout from the complete mis-management of this place. More job losses, more... shit, really.
Still, I'll be in the pub soon.