How many
CEOs/High-level Execs will take a pay cut, or go unpaid for a bit?
Outsourcing firm CSC has joined other IT giants by ordering staff to take extra holiday over Christmas in a bid to cut costs. Managers in CSC's Global Outsourcing Services (GOS) division have been told to identify critical areas that need to be staffed by a skeleton crew during the festive period, according to an internal …
CSC employees (at least in the US) can *not* accrue any new vacation time through the 1st quarter of 2009. So after they use their mandatory 7 days before Christmas, and if they don't have any other vacation days banked up, they won't be able to take ANY time off until April '09.
Nice..
The 'saving'is in NOT having to attribute costs from project budgets to all those days that would otherwise be 'worked' - all those staff have to book time to something when they are in the office.
Forcing people to take their annual leave means that the books will look better - project managers do not incur seven days of fees on all their staff - that's a 35% cost reduction for December or 10% for the final quarter of the year.
It's purely temporary and has no long-term benefit, all they are really doing is pushing costs into the next quarter. EDS used to (probably still does) stamp hard on 'unneccesary expenditure' towards the end of every quarter to try and meet targets. It's quite common and particularly American.
I don't know how CSC's accounting works but many companies that are doing this have a vacation pay fund that accumulates the $ as employees earn the vacation. By forcing the employees to take accumulated vacation they get to pay them out of that fund rather than operating $.
"Is that by business unit?"
It must be... I got wind of it from a buddy of mine who works for CSC in the Midwest. We assumed it was company wide.
They figure that come April, there will be another large round of layoffs. (after getting 3 months of work out of them, and not having to paid for accrued vacation during that time)
The thing that I find so funny about this is that they have implemented a "managed" vacation plan. And with usual <sarcastic> brilliant </sarcastic> execution, they wait until the end of the fracking year to tell those of us with substantial amounts of vacation built up, we need to burn most of it prior to 3/31.
OK, I can actually accept the managed vacation policy, as it does limit some financial liability that the company is responsible for, when they eliminate employees. But waiting until the end of the year and telling technical staff that they have to put all of their revenue generating projects on hold and burn vacation, is just plain stupid.
We've had a lot of idiots in power positions at CSC but Rick's takes the cake. And I haven't figured out if he and his minions are positioning GOS to be placed on the auction block or if they've come to that last act of desperation, because they've mismanaged the company so badly?
If the internal rumors are true, which I wouldn't be surprised if they are (as this is outrageous enough to come from the upper tier of CSC), IF an employee is unable to comply with the managed vacation policy, they are identified as "high risk" and will be placed on a possible RIF list.
Just a personal note to Dick:
News flash numb nuts, instead of beating all of the mules to death, why don't you reduce some of the endless ranks of upper middle management that you've personally had a hand in creating? Most of those morons are redundant bean counters and we're a fucking technology company... How many accountants and managers do you need generating pretty pie charts and power point spreadsheets showing that we're leaking money like a sieve, because your ego won't allow you to accept the fact that you are simply wrong.
If you're not careful, you'll steer us down the same path as the American auto industry, if you aready havent (but just don't know it yet).