Slashdot Mirror
"Industry Standard" Paycuts in IT?
noGarnishMe! asks: "I was just reading about a Chicago-based company that has told all its employees earning over $60K/year that they will have to accept a 50% percent paycut for the month of May. This cut might be necessary in these times but keep in mind that the bozos in senior management just finished buying up several failing companies and paying some large bonuses to themselves. The memo announcing the cut is here. This cut, coming in such large chunk and in May, seems like a draconian shot to boost the 2d quarter financials. True, the annual paycut of 3.8% is modest but it ignores that fact that many folks won't be able to pay their May bills with only half their salary. I know that many of us have been through rough times these past 18 months and so I ask, what has been the approach at your company?" There are graceful and non-graceful ways for a company to handle a lack of cash flow. In the scramble for survival, especially in an economic downturn, many companies are caught off-guard and have to show their shareholders that they are doing something to get the company back on the road to profitability (which seems to be the issue, here). In many of these cases, the group most affected by such changes are the employees. It would be interesting to note how many of you have gone through this before and what you had to do to survive the shortfall.
I worked for those fuckers. I took the special "4 week" plan back in January... man, am I glad I left that job. Apparently our department is having trouble getting approval to buy RAM.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'd take a 50% pay cut but in exchange I would only work 2.5 days a week or 4 hours days. That would give me some extra time during the nice summer months.
It sounds like these guys have a severe short-term cashflow problem, rather than a longterm profitability problem... otherwise they could have asked staff to take the cut over the next six months, or take 2 weeks unpaiod vacation some time over the year, etc.
The real problem is that cashflow problems can be extremely hard to get over... and now they've probably alienated most of their remaining staff. I would hope that this comany tried their hardest to liquidate furniture, benefits, executive cars, office space etc before they did this, otherwise they'll have a mass exodus on their hands (which may of course be what they want).
In Europe, where I work, it's much harder to do something like this, for better or for worse; most countries don't allow unilateral cuts.
Alex.
Ah, computer dating -- it's like pimping, but you rarely have to use the phrase "upside your head" -- Bender
Wouldn't know about how the private sector is handling these rough times; our agency has never had a RIF. It is at times like this I appreciate being recruited by the fed. Sounds like it is more attractive everyday: employment for life + great benefits + transfer anywhere in country (and some foreign posts) + good wages.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Solving cash flow problems in this way is _not_ a good idea. First, the workplace will rumble with the roar of resumes being printed and sent to competitors by all competent staff. Second, if the customers get a whiff of this (and they might), some may decide not to do business with a sinking ship and leave (or at least postpone any contracts), and put the company in ever more difficulties than before.
Better, actually, to acknowledge that the staffing is too high, and cut some staff outright. Better for the company, and, really, better for the staff that do not have to live in a constant state of anxiety and insecurity while trying to do their job. I mean, what do you prefer: get cut outright, with a couple of months salary in your pocket and free tolook for something better; or losing half your pay for a month, maybe for the next month as well, then maybe get cut anyway (or see the company collapse) and never see that money again - and all the while expected to do your job instead of having time and energy to search for a better one?
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Sure, they are saving money on wages, but think how much their paper and toner costs are going to go up with all the resumes being printed.
I cannot see any other imaginiable explanation.
I have in the last week been offered a job at a significantly higher sum than their cutoff number, and as a counteroffer I have been offered by my current employer a 24% share in a spinoff of ourselves dedicated to the sales and development in my area of expertise.
The coffers of companies marketing and purchasing budgets are ovrflowing since the 911 hold on most big dollar activities. Companies are gearing up to spend.
If you have a product/service that sucks, or if managment of that company is so blind to have had too much belief in an idea and over employed based on those misconceptions of the product or its marketplace youre screwed.
Big money is moving, you just need to be in the right place to catch it. If youre not its managments fault. PERIOD. Now with that said, managment will find any excuse they can to mask their involvment in your current situation, the first is to blame the economy, but even that one is wearing thin with most.
Overexpansion, Overmanagment, Underselling, Overpaid salaries (although 60k isnt much for even a howler monkey)
I looked at the company in this article, I still cannot see what tangible product or service the sell clearly, THAT is a problem in my opinion and probably has something to do with their current situation.
I wonder how much of a Pay-Cut managment is taking ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
No Backups.
:)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
You have a contract that they can't change at will.
Um... shouldn't that read, "If you have a contract they can't change at will"? A fair share of employees these days are precisely "employees at will," with no obligation on either party aside from payment for services rendered. This is the way I've always worked.
This is actually kind of the problem with employment at will: management can hand down whatever terms they want, and it's their way or the highway. This is justified with deference to "the market," on the theory that if conditions get bad enough, you can just go work somewhere else. But a lot of times that's impossible or very difficult in practice; if they have you working long hours for low pay, you have very little time or resources to seek another job.
I'd prefer that I had a set contract for most of the jobs I've had, but that's not the way it's worked.
You can usually cut dead weight at a company pretty easily by organizing them in alphabetical order by title, and going down the list firing people until you have enough money to pay everybody else.
Chief comes before Programmer, Executive comes before Technical...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Um. The company wants to become profiable by November, so they have 6 months, and they think cutting 1 months worth of IT salary is going to do it? 60/12=5 So Instead of paying out 5k per IT staff, they'll cut that to 2500. If they have 100 people, that's 250k. Anything less than that, I wouldn't consider worth the risk..
Besides, why would they need 100 IT people at over 60k?
Doesn't sound healthy to me..
My suggestion: GET OUT NOW
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Which category does "subscriptions" fall under?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The sad thing is, you would be better off being payed $57,501 to $59,999 than being payed $60k exactly. How silly.
BTW, anyone who is earning that kind of wage and still living from paycheck to paycheck is, well, a fscking idiot. There are families that earn $30k/year on a single salary with children and still save money. More to the point, if you're working in a high tech job right now and don't have an appreciable amount of cash in an "oh shit" fund, you're going to find out the hard way what a bad idea that is.
Having 3-6 months of living money (rent/mortgage, utilities, food, etc) in liquid savings (CDs are ok if done wisely, money market, savings acct, etc. but NOT stocks or mutual funds) is really something people should do. You can scoff, but when you suddenly find yourself unemployed, it's the people with these funds that are going to be fine and able to focus on finding a new job. The people without them will be visiting bankruptcy court.
My experience has always been that this type of crap is always followed by "save the company" pushes. Basicly, (we are laying off your staff)|(cutting your pay), but need you to work extra to take up the slack, and by the way, we have these new projects that need to go out faster than usual, because we need to save the company. If you don't work harder, faster, smarter, you will be out of a job too.
I'm glad I work for the government now....
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
A fifty percent pay cut doesn't say, "Stick together group, and we'll all make it through these hard times." Nope.
A fifty percent pay cut says, "We know many of you will quit because of this horrendous abuse we are imposing on our employees, and to us, this is good, because if we just fired you, we'd have to pay unemployment benefits"
Yearly raises recently came around at the company I work for, and my raise was 0.5%, a percent of a percent. So, I did what any self-respecting working stiff would do, I found a new job for a company that makes enough money to pay its employees.
I get the feeling that a number of corporations are leaning on the current state of the economy to cover up their own stupidity and lack of management skills. I always watch the want ads in the Sunday paper (even now that I am starting a new job on Monday), why? I think it is a good exercise to get a feel for where the job market is going. Should I consider pushing for training in one area vs. another, and that kind of thing. What I have seen has been an upswing in people looking for talented and experienced help. I get the feeling that successful companies realize it is better to get somebody who has some real world experience than to go cheap and hire straight from school (of course, larger operations still recruit newbies, but they have the staff to train them proper, and the need for people who'll put up with a large amount of grunt work).
Actually, even though I found a job right away, I still have to budget next month to stay afloat. The new job has a two week delay on pay, and my current job doesn't, so I miss a check. To boot, last month I had to pay Uncle Sam, and buy things for spring, like a lawn mower, etc.. Well, it was an expensive month overall. Luckily for me, I have some reserves for the tough times, and with some frugal behavior, I should be ok.
If you don't have money squirreled away, you might have to get creative. One thing you could consider doing is selling some stock for a loss. You'll get cash right away, and capital losses are a tax deduction. Also, if you have something that you could sell, you might think about that. I have the luxury of being able to sell my old car, as it isn't completely worthless yet, but most people can't afford to do that (however, if you drive a nice new car, you could sell it, swallow your pride, and downgrade - a car is for getting there, not being mr. cool).
Bottom line, I'd recommend updating your resume and sending it out. Why stay at a company that treats its employees like s#!t? A good company with solid management recognizes that people are the greatest asset a company can have, because people learn and improve their skills with time, while capital investments quickly becomes out-of-date.
Best of luck to you.
Why should IT workers accept less than their moron bosses?
Why should this person accept a 50% pay cut? Do you think public school teachers or Teamsters would?
One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless.
If there were a union, this company would be shut down right now.
Companies should be paying attention (and paying) the people with their hand on the switch. How long could a company last with a marketing work stoppage?
How long do you think they'd operate with an IT work stoppage?
It's time to stop abuses like these before you become "too old to be retrained", replaced by an indentured H1-B visa worker, or have your salary reduced to pay for the CEOs new manor house.
BTW, anyone who is earning that kind of wage and still living from paycheck to paycheck is, well, a fscking idiot.
I resent that. Yes, I was an idiot (back in college), racking up a lot of credit card debt. I now find myself paying off all of that, plus a hefty student loan to boot. I do quite well for myself (not $60K, to be sure), but quite frankly, the minimum monthly payments on my outstanding debts swallow just about every penny I take home (well, that which isn't taken by rent, utilities, etc.).
Your advice is definitely sound, and I'm working on building up my rainy-day fund, but it's going to take a while, and meantime, I'm vulnerable.
All I'm trying to say is, some of us are no longer idiots, but still manage to find ourselves in this position.
And if you can find any executives who got bonuses, flog 'em mercilessly until you feel like you've gotten half your salary's worth.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Ummmmm, just because 60k is well above the cost of living, doesn't mean that loosing half your pay is a trivial thing. Gnereally speaking, as your income grows, so do your expenses. Few people put everything away over the bare necessities. Many people don't put anything away, even when they make a good deal of money. However, even if you DO put money away, if you invest it well it's not something that you want to just grab.
Take my parents for example, combined they make well over $100,000. They certianly doin't live paycheck to paycheck and they invest quite a bit. However it would be a hardship if 50% of their pay evaporated for a month. There are bills to be paid and I'm betting they do total half or more of their total income. So if half of it dissappeared, they'd need to tap into savings.
Well contrary to what you might think smart people do NOT save money by hiding it under a matress or even leaving it in a bank. A good deal of it is in non-liquid assets like land, their house, etc. This cannot just be easily liquidated. Even at a large loss it would be problematic to liquidate it in a couple weeks. The most luquid asset they really invest in is stocks. However even those aren't something you want to liquidate unless it's absolutly necessary. In addition to paying captial gains (on those that are up) you then loose the potential growth.
Long term investments aren't something you just want to gte rid of, it costs you far more than just the actual money you get from it. As for getting fired, generally when you have a job of that level you have a contract that gaurentees you a severence pay of at least a monet, often more. Gives you time to get a new job, and so on.
Basically ti's jsut a really dick move on the part of their company. A paycut is one thing, people don't like them but in a slow economy a 4% paycut is probably something employees making that much wouldn't really get all that mad about. The problem here is that first, it's being applied retroactive to the beginning of the year. They aren't just cutting your pay, they are cutting what they already paid you for the first 6 months by 4%. Second, it's the huge hit that the employees ahve to take over the short term. Like I said, it really causes problems, even if you have saved up.
Also this is something that will make people additonally angry because there's no reason for it. If the problem truly was jsut a slower economy and profits going down, a standard pay cut would do the trick just fine. The onyl reason for a quickm drastic cut like this is to attempt to artificially inflate earnigs this quarter. And then there is the fact that the management is NOT taking a paycut and, indeed giving themselves large bonuses.
It makes people rather angry when they are forced to endure hardship because the morons up top refuse to take any responsibliity. SOmething tells me that had the management just not given themselves bonuses, it would have more than made up the total amount the company will gain in this pay cut.
Tell everyone in the IT to stick together, and you may be able to "convince" the upper management, that going through with this pay cut, at ANY time, would be a "Bad Thing"
PS ... Start getting that resume polished up right now ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
I'm the CEO of a small 14yo IT company. During the recent internet nonsense we were careful not to do anything blately stupid and stuck to our business plan. In doing so, we have avoided being squashed when the bubble burst and in fact are doing quite well.
However, one time in the past we hit a real rough spot. We knew we had to reduce payroll. One of the steps was a temporary paycut.
But unlike the lead story here, the paycut started with the CEO (me) and all of the executive management. Then the highest paid ($80K and up) employees on a voluntary basis. That's right, we ASKED them to do it for the good of the company. Not a single person declined.
I promised that when things got better, I'd return all of the pay. Many smiled but didn't seem to believe that was likely. But, in fact, several months later, things did recover and I tacked on all the lost pay to their next paychecks (including my own).
I think the fact that I was the first to do it made a difference. It was hard, but it worked.
David Whatley
I worked for a company for a month. They announced that they had been bought and were closing their NYC office (this was a bit of a shock - the company's been around for 148 years, and always headquartered in New York.) instead of canning us all immediately, they offered us our old wages until the office was officially closed, plus vacation, plus unemployment, plus a stay-pay bonus of 2 months pay for sticking it through to the end. The advantage? I guarantee that none of us who eventually got laid off has a single, bad thing to say about the company. T'was smart of them.
Triv