Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Furloughs: A worker says they're exempt; are you?
Regarding the new round of required unpaid weeks off, a reader says they're not required to take a furlough. When the worker asked why, "I was told the reason was confidential.'' The employee worries about the reaction from co-workers when they notice a name missing from the furlough schedule. Now, the employee wants to know if there are other Gannett workers also declared exempt.
5 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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One of our employees (I'm at a TV station in a top-10 market) told me during the first furlough flurry that he renegotiated his contract to take less money so he wouldn't have to take a furlough.
ReplyDeleteThis time around, he's taking one. When he didn't take the last one, he had to do everyone else's work in addition to his own with no "furcation" to recover.
Seems kind of strange, unless the employee is in a critical position that there's only one of, say (like a Web producer at a small paper), and they can't get someone else trained in time to cover.
ReplyDelete5:05pm -- that might happen at a small paper, but at a top-ten TV station, we don't even HAVE a web producer anymore. They've all been taken by the news department, and the news department is now responsible for posting news stories.
ReplyDeleteUnlike at a newspaper, though, television news people for the most part have no idea how to write a news story that isn't an on-air script. It is PAINFUL to look at our website -- the stories are pallid rewrites of what was on television, with no additional or sidebar-related content, the Maven tagging is atrocious, and certain employees have to spend between 60 and 180 minutes each day making the site not look like someone threw spaghetti at it and hoped it stuck.
So when the one web producer who isn't stuck going to meetings 95% of the time is on furlough, the site looks... well, just like what I said.
Dubow's coming to one of the top-ten TV stations tomorrow (April 1). That's not a joke. I wonder what kind of reception he'll receive from the peons on the ground floor.
Here's one to chew on: In the second quarter furlough many of us will be taking our furloughs one day per pay period again. That means one day per two weeks we will be off without pay.
ReplyDeleteHowever, since this will not leave enough of us working to get the job done, during the OTHER week in the two week pay period we will work an extra day AT OVERTIME PAY.
How's them apples?
When I was told this I was speechless, even after having worked for the company for quite a while.
Top 10 TV Market - Sales reps don't take furloughs
ReplyDelete