[quote=teaboy][quote=Coronita]So……Here’s something funny that happened at work. We had to furlow some people at work for 1/day per week back in end of March, or reduce their hours by 8hours/week[/quote]
Question.. are those employees exempt or hourly? If they’re exempt, why did your company have to cut their hours at all?
I’m exempt and my total pay was reduced by my company by 7%, without any formal reduction in my hours.
tb[/quote]
It was done to both exempt and non exempt employees. For several of exempt employees, the hours were reduced to 32 hours/4 day work weeks, and consequently reducing pay by 20% (1 day of pay). SMT didn’t feel it was fair just to cut their pay and still continue to expect people to work the same hours (Me, in particular objected to this idea along with many others in the leadership team. Yes team, you’re welcome)… So we went to a 4 day work week in CA and in out of state offices for some of us. And 32 hours is the minimum to maintain a full-time status that would qualify for all the employee benefits medical/dental/vision/life/disability/etcetceetc for exempt employees without having to change the employee benefits. We thought this was the fairest way to handle things. And plus a few of us thought the state+federal government would eventually throw folks a bone and make up for the income shortfalls.
By actually reducing hours and pay, it would qualify the employer/employee under the the CA “Worksharing” program that our company applied and was approved for.
It was done to preempt a cash flow issue if more customers deferred their purchases or deferred paying us, some of which indicated they were skipping March – May (some that now have come back and said things will resume in June/July)….I guess our senior management team figured it was better to dump the problem onto the state/federal UI benefit program. And it turns out, at least for our CA employees, everyone seem to be getting more back from the state+federal UI insurance then if they were to be working the 5th day. Almost everyone is getting the full $1050/week, because the extra $600 from the federal government is not capped by income reduction, it’s all or nothing… So they are coming out ahead each week about $300-500 per week, because very few engineers and product managers make $1050/day, lol
So… Go from a 5 day to 4 day work week, get paid more for the 5th furlow day than work…And June/July timeframe, resume business as usual when PO’s start coming in (or if not, extend the furlow day until they do)…from an employee’s perspective, what is there to complain about again??? Nothing….. Lol
The only real problem is now that we got customer orders coming in and customers paying again, we actually need some people back right away, and trying to ask people volunteer to come back is getting slow traction… I don’t blame people.
It’s kinda funny. It’s not like we were trying to game the system. But sometimes, the system’s game just plays out in unexpected ways. Some people aren’t just doing as well, they actually are doing better , lol.
