CNHI Furloughs

Just do the bare minimum.

 

I DO sympathize with those affected, but there are two sides to every story. Right now, I would dearly love to have five full days off. You can keep the pay, I just need the time. Wishing I could trade places.

 

If you get furloughed, take advantage of the time off. Either search for a new job, or just step away from it and recharge. Don't check work e-mail, don't blog or tweet. Go for a nice walk or drive, spend time with family, or catch up on TV shows or movies you missed.

 

That's how I treat my furlough -- no blogging, no tweeting, no email and no answering phone calls from work (they're not supposed to call you but it does happen). Also, no giving away extra hours the rest of that week -- for anything.

The worst part about furloughs, though, is that because we're a daily paper, we have to get the paper out every night. So when people are gone, others have to pick up the slack. There's no cutting back due to lack of manpower. I hate that CNHI (at least from our shop) never sees how furloughs hurt the product because we're to busy making up the work, whether it's in the reporting, editing or layout process. And that wears on everyone.

Think about it: 31 days over the last seven quarters. Multiply that by the number of employees you have and that's a lot of time and work to make up.

 

Colton you're breaking the law by working through those furloughs and if your shop is looking the other way while you do they deserve to be hit with a six figure fine.

 

My wife, who works for state government, has been hit with a furlough day a month for the past two years. Our attitude as soon as she found out wast that at least she still had the job, and, while we could certainly use the money, she has thoroughly enjoyed those days of. They always fall on Fridays, so she gets a three-day weekend out of it.

It'd be tough if not impossible for newspapers to do that, especially in sports. When I worked in newspapers, even when furloughs weren't being handed out, I rarely got two days in a row off.

I feel for those employed by the CNHI reich.

 

Can someone please tell me how you lay off/furlough people and still get the same amount of work done?

Simple. You don't. You don't cover stuff you normally would cover. You slap a wire story on the page instead of a local feature. You don't run the prep/college stats you used to run. You don't go the extra mile to do something you might formally have done. You don't come in early or stay late. Maybe you make deadline, maybe you don't.

I've already told my supervisor to forget the feature I was scheduled to do this week and the events I was supposed to cover. We'll get the results by phone. I'm not putting in 12-13 hours of reporting and working the desk anymore because we don't have enough bodies to go around.

I've come to the conclusion it's stupid to bust my tail for the sake of a management that doesn't give two shits. Show me YOU care and I'll reciprocate. Show me you don't care, and I'll reciprocate.

 

More people need to have that attitude, Mark.

 

Well, we got our notice today. ... Funny, I think I have found out about every one of these furloughs or DOWOPs (seriously, they're calling them Days Off Without Pay and have an acronym that sounds like a musical style) on Sportsjournalists before finding out at work -- usually by a day or two.

 

That's because sj is awesome and CNHI ...


... is not.

Sorry about the furlough man. Find a way to maximize it.

 

The huge problem with cnhi furloughs is how the company sets its budget. Each newspaper has to hit a quarterly expense target based on what it did a year prior. And now that cnhi has been living with these furloughs for more than a year, it's going to be devilishly hard for publishers or editors to get enough wiggle room in their expense budgets (and hit profit margins) WITHOUT the furloughs. It's a vicious circle that most media companies can navigate, but it seems beyond cnhi to pull out of the spiral.

(Disclaimer: I used to be one of those cnhi budget-setting people - not at corporate, but I had to deliver the numbers at my newspaper. My happiest day, professionally, was leaving.)

 

They haven't announced it at my paper yet. What happens if you just don't take them? Will they fire you on the spot or what? Anybody seen anything like it at their shops?

They always make me fill out the paper with the days, but then I'm supposed to "take them when I can fit them in here or there" instead of the actual days I picked. Haven't taken any of mine for the third quarter yet in an effort to try to alleviate the debt this has floored me with. It's probably going to come down to the last week when I'll just get stuck taking them all at the same time, for the first time since they started them in 2009.