Move along; nothing to see here

Here's the running CNHI furlough tally, starting with second quarter of 2009 (Also, I looked back and my last raise came in fall of 2008):

2009
1Q
2Q 5 days
3Q 5
4Q 1 (Christmas!)

2010
1Q 4
2Q 5
3Q 5
4Q 5

2011
1Q 5
2Q 5
3Q 5
4Q 5

2012
1Q 5
2Q 5
3Q 5
4Q 5

2013
1Q 5
2Q
3Q
4Q

That's 75 days over 16 quarters. There are 20 full-timers in our newsroom (editors/writers/desk/photogs), so, by the end of March that will be 1,500 days lost to furlough over a four-year span. And since we're a daily newspaper, we continue to try to put out a product that doesn't look like it's suffered as a result of those furloughs. And that means picking up the slack/covering the beat during someone else's furlough, working ahead/cramming in extra work to make sure stuff isn't missed on your own furlough days, making sure the daily newspaper gets out without incident despite having fewer bodies to cover beats/write stories/edit copy/paginate. All the while, during this same span, we're adding blogs and Twitter (which I support) and video and doing extra on the web and going hyper-local with our stories. More with less.

 

Zag, as per usual, you have this nailed (sadly).

 

Actually my buds are late pretty regularly now. And they've come to the conclusion that nothing will be done because if they fire them, corporate may not replace them, so the local powers that be realize that would make the situation worse. But, they have come up with an idea: suspend people for mistakes. Even excessive traffic tickets. Yeah that's right, suspensions for tickets, even if they're on their own time.

I'm so glad I got out of the most toxic work environment I ever took part in.

 

They have actually FIRED people at my shop because of too many traffic tickets, all accumulated on their own time.

 

How do they learn about the traffic tickets?

 

Jimmy: Of the myriad of things we are required to read and sign, included is form that gives corporate the OK to investigate our driving records every year. It's also in our handbook that we can be terminated for it and that we are required to report all violations to our management.

*Cue the Soviet Union national anthem from Rocky IV*

 

As someone wanting to leave the field myself, to what career did you transition?

 

I can vouch for this. I was a CNHI manager when the policy went into effect. CNHI got a discount on its liability insurance rate if they could prove that its employees had safe driving records -- no more than 3 moving violations in a 2-year period, no DUIs and no reckless driving convictions, if memory serves. Any employee who drove as part of their job was required to abide by the policy. I had to counsel one reporter who got two speeding tickets in a year and tell her if she got another we'd have to let her go because we didn't have a place on staff for an employee who couldn't drive for us. This reporter, of course, was in no threat of losing her driver's license, but she would have lost her job all the same.

Our management team also debated if we would ever be required to enforce the policy for someone who never had to drive on the job - a copy editor, for example. There was a school of thought that CNHI would require us to terminate people who never drove during their shift because we wouldn't want to be responsible for someone causing an accident on the way to or from the office. Thankfully, we never had to walk down that path.

 

Suspensions and Firings over traffic tickets???? WTF????

Never heard of anything like that before. Lucky for me, I'm a very good driver.

 

Our publisher at the time did everything he could to save the photog's job, to no avail.

 

This could end real quick if you got your co-workers to band together and tell management that all of you would charge the company for gas mileage and overtime for ALL of your off-the-clock driving. If they're going to claim that you are still their responsiblity even when you're off the clock, then you should be getting compensated for that. And any employee who gets fired for tickets accrued off-the-clock should sue the company for back pay and gas mileage. Either you're on the clock, or off.

If they're going to profit from you off-the-clock, then you might as well profit from them.

 

That's a really interesting observation you make. I just doubt that, legally, you can do anything about it.