L-Day

I’ve often wondered if the planners of the Normandy invasion had any idea that the military term “D-Day” would become synonymous in certain regions where English is spoken with “the day on which momentous, potentially hazardous things happen.” I wonder this because I also think that it’s not very often that we get advance warning that events like this are about to happen.

Sure, we plan for weddings and we get plenty of warning about most births, which are also momentous, but how often do we get a warning that our life is about to change in a major way that isn’t of our choosing? Likely we get warning more often than not, I think, but the signs are often small and we often ignore them because human beings have a large talent for self-delusion and rationalization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days because most of the signs in my professional life point to a major change coming.

I think I’m about to get laid off.

Actually, that’s not true. Getting laid off wouldn’t be the worst case scenario of what my obsessive brain has determined are the three most likely possibilities at an organization one of my local co-workers described recently as “having a whiff of the Titanic about it.” No, getting laid off is actually second shittiest thing Management could do to me at this point.

The best case scenario in light of my employer’s vast financial difficulties would be furlough days. I’d get to keep the relative certainty of a steady, if reduced, pay check while getting some time to recover from the deep burnout I’m feeling as a result of having to deal with Management’s lack thereof. I’d have more opportunities to look for another full-time job or to work on building up my freelance business, and, frankly, more time to take care of the life part of that “work/life balance” employers are so fond of trotting out when they hire and so good at ignoring after they’ve snared you. Furlough days would be the perfect gift of both time and funds, and based on Management’s recent attitude, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll do anything that even vaguely smells of benefiting the employees.

More likely they’ll issue us salary cuts and expect us to keep working full-time taking the stance that we should be thankful to have jobs at all. And the audacity of both that action and that attitude enrages me.

I don’t think Management is actually smart enough have considered all the angles on asking staff to take salary cuts and I freely admit that I am intellectually vain and resent being treated as if I am stupid by people whom I perceive to be not as smart as I am.

From where I stand, there is no incentive for me to accept a salary cut in a job where I am already underpaid by $10,000 a year even by non-profit standards. Accepting a salary cut tells Management that they can get me to work full time for even less money than I was making already and gives them no incentive to raise my pay back to previous rates when finances are better because, after all, I kept working full-time at a lower rate so I’m obviously willing to do the job for less money. Plus, accepting a salary cut on the condition that the monies will be repaid in the future when the organization is in a better financial position is predicated on the idea that the organization will recover to previous levels, something which I have little faith and even less evidence will occur, and it ties me to this job until they pay me back because it’s certain that any repayment agreement will be structured such that if I leave prior to a certain point I’ll be forfeiting those owed monies.

All of this, of course, is speculation since one of the major problems with both Management and the management of the particular office in which I work is communication. No one who makes decisions about the fate of National Office staff actually sits in our office. We are always the last group of people to be officially told not only about organizational changes but specifically about organizational changes that affect us. And we’re completely and utterly without supervisory coherence. There is no one Boss of Bosses, at least there isn’t one who is willing to take any kind of responsibility since BigBoss is 3,000 miles away and really doesn’t have to care how bad morale is in DC.

I just have to wait until my (re)scheduled meeting with my boss, who sits in Philadelphia, this afternoon to find out what is actually going on. Until then, the only thing I can do is anticipate Management’s moves.