CSC cost-cutting spreads to Europe CSC staff in the US have been forced to take a compulsory, temporary pay cut, and now staff in Europe are being told they must take five days leave before 1 April to help the company hit its targets for the financial quarter. In an internal email – seen by the Register – Andy Williams, CSC's president and CEO, wrote: "We are …
Its the largest outsourcing company that you have never heard of. 100,000+ people on 5 continents I believe. I only heard of them when I was hired as a contractor for a large US defense contractor. They are based in a 3 story black modern office building 2 blocks from where Im sitting right now.
So, making all the staff take 5 days holiday will have "a substantial positive effect on our financial performance this quarter".
Assuming that CSC UK have 20,000 front line employees (I have no idea how many they actually have), that is 100,000 man days of reduced service delivery capability delivered to their end clients over the next 2 -3 months. I can't see how that has any positive effect at all when considering that it's service delivery that CSC are primarily measured on by their end clients.
This is a doomed company and I feel sorry for the employees at the coalface.
Unfortunately this is about financial performance rather than service delivery (which will no doubt suffer) and is nothing more than CSC UK pretending to the US that it made its quarterly numbers by cheating.
Making the numbers is the ultimate responsibility of the senior managers (not the people on the ground) and if they are not going to meet targets they should say so, take responsibility and face the consequences. If that means losing their job(s) then so be it...
I'm not a CSC employee so can't comment on the specific of their contract but, unless CSC has been forward thinking (and seriously guys, we are talking CSC here...), I doubt this would comply with a standard contract... so they might "ask" (or strongly recommend) their employees to take those 5 days (in case they want to dream about a promotion, salary review or anything) but look unenforceable to me! (Except for days carried over from last year which you usually have to take before end of Q1).
It's possible that CSC's contracts do have clauses to permit the company to enforce holidays - the large American company I work for does.
If not you're right they cannot enforce it, but they can ask in such a way that most people would be uncomfortable saying 'no'...
no comprende - this is going to make exactly zero difference to the company figures.
Over the year there are X working days, some of which will be taken from the employee's yearly allowance of paid leave.
So if there are, say 40 working days from now until April (just a guess, I haven't worked it out) then the employee will get paid (and hence the employer will pay) exactly the same amount, whether the employee works for 40 days, or works for 35 days and has 5 days holiday, or works for 20 days and has 20 days holiday.
So what are they on about?
Some will no doubt take a sickie later in the year to get their days back. As most employees buy extra holiday this already saves CSC a lot of money. To then have to waste it is a kick in the teeth to what is a hard working underappreciated workforce.
Andy Williams was very sneaky in sending two emails, us Team Leads got our own copy basically saying harass the employees until they book their 5 days. No doubt further cuts will occur probably with training, and payrises which is a shame as training has improved in the last couple of years since a special department was set up to manage it.
Bring back Nick Wilson!
"Oh dear, I'm afraid your review this year isn't as good as last year's. In fact, you didn't meet your goals, and were late on your targets in the first quarter this year. I'm so sorry, but you won't be eligible for that raise we mentioned we were sure you'd deserve after last year's review."
Think Cat-bert giggling maniacally, we say they _can't_ work, then blame them for not working enough! (cat giggles sound *evil*)
I'm not getting the purpose of 5 days of annual leave (presumably paid for, otherwise it'd be called unpaid leave) before the end of the financial year. Last time I looked, taking some annual leave did not change my pay for that period. Contractor's whom invoice against time yes, but the article says "employees".
So how does this improve finances?
Almost all employees are aligned to one or more contracts, and internally bill their time to those contracts (revenue generating - do they still use TES?). They also bill holidays to a holiday code, and crucially, unallocated time to a bench code. So any employee "on the bench" is a greater expense than someone on holiday, since they still get paid for their holidays later in the year.
I'm guessing they have a substantial number of people on the bench at the moment, therefore moving around resource maximises the revenue generating customer time and holidays minimises bench time.
At least that's how it works from a beancounter perspective.
Do the employees have unpaid leave normally? I don't get it. Unless it was to.stop people carrying forward leave into next financial year. But then 5 days might not be enough for everyone.
Only thing I can think is the offices will have less staff in, there for using less power. Strange.
I guess it depends on how you treat employee holidays, accounting-wise. If accounted for as a liability (ie 1 day holiday = 1 future day of pay with no return) then a day of holiday might be net zero on the books and thus better for executive bonuses than paying somebody for working.
All,
Lots of comments on how employees taking leave can help finances. A couple of possibilities; firstly people on leave don't incur overheads (use office space, electricity, communications costs etc).
The other possibility is some kind of accounting fiddle where leave costs are covered by a different pot of money than day-to-day operations, so it APPEARS that day-to-day costs are lower, so the finances at this level look better. Makes no difference to overall company performance of course...
Don't know about in the UK, but in the US, employees' annual leave (holiday) accumulation is, essentially, an accounts payable classification, rather than salary. So if the employees are forc... <hic> asked to take five days of holiday by a certain date, that payment reduces the accounts payable... making the company's numbers look somewhat better. Still doesn't resolve the issue of the work not getting done because employees aren't there to do the work. And if there's only forty days for the employees to take the time off, that means that, on average, 12.5% of the employees will be on leave at any given time, but since they didn't have advance notice, probably more like 15-20% of the employees will be off. Lots of work won't get done on time, or the company will find out they didn't really need all those employees, and there will a a round of layoffs/redundencies in a couple of months.
Hand grenade because this company is choosing to blow itself up to ensure executive bonuses for this quarter.
This isn't a new tactic by CSC. They used this method a few years back when I worked for them (via TUPE), however, the difference then was that it was just the contractors who had to take 5 days off (in the UK at least). The crap I had to take from some of my guys overt his was dreadful. They knew it wasn't my fault but the frustration at the lack of leadership was scary. Most companies I know would sack there senior management over this but CSC Management seem to get away with it as long as the share price doesn't drop. I really can't believe they are still operating outside of the US/UK Defence arena. I think the biggest thing is that would you trust this Chicken Sh!t Company running your IT systems..... I really feel sorry for the workforce having to take this sort of abuse.
Move money here, shave a service there, pad out some accounting shenanagans on Executive Beancounters spreadsheets and voila..... we've made some profit.... you haven't really, and staff are still unhappy, most of them are lacklustre at best (think Customer Service Support Staff rather than IT Engineer) and the service provided for costs charged are astronomical .....
BTW, in the UK CSC provide Desktop, Gateway, Infrastructure support and extortionately priced Project Management to:
Department of Health
Care Quality Commission
Railtrack
Transport for London
Hmmmm, this list is by no way definitive (they are all over the place) and might go some way to explaining why services in these organisations are p*ss poor and why they never have any money anymore.
I was fortunate...just missed out on a 'glorious' opprtunity to be TUPE'd over to these muppets
Skull and crossbones coz that's what the CSC corporate logo should really be...
I have had the misfortune of working for CSC in the US for a few years now; no pay raise in three years, no training budget, several layers of useless management making everything a bureaucratic nightmare, and now a "temporary" 5% pay cut and jerking around with holidays. In the US they can force you to take holidays whenever they want so they now control when you can go on holiday which doesn't let you plan your own time off. Meanwhile, on December 13 they increased the stock dividend 33%. Many of their contracts are fixed fee managed services deals and the only way for them to increase profit on those is to cut costs; which boils down to personel costs. I wouldn't hire these fools and knaves to clean up after my dog.
Sounds like HP from 2005-2009. Because of accruals accounting principle, getting staff to take holiday makes a difference to opex. there is a alkso a direct reduction in expenses whilst they are all off.
It is a sign of desparation though. I expect the marketing and travel budgets have already been pruned.
That's the trouble with relying on Public Sector contracts. Especially in current US and UK climate
There are certainly a lot worse companies around. While many other IT companies in the UK such as HP(EDS) have been busy making waves of redundancies over the last couple of years, CSC haven't and in fact gave a small pay rise last year. I've got friends who left CSC for HP(EDS) and are now desperate to return. Yes, this year CSC have been making extra efforts to cut costs and bureaucracy which isn't that surprising as some of our biggest clients are spending less on everything, including IT. Most of us prefer this approach to jumping straight to cutting jobs. I speak as a someone who has worked for them for a few years on the front-line, delivering successful innovative projects and services to various clients.
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