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Okay, so our department has been asked by the hospital (well, asked makes it sound like we had a choice--TOLD by the hospital) to cut between 860,000 and 1.1 million dollars out of our FY '02 budget by October 22. This will translate into approx. 20-25 FTE's (full time employees).
The hospital is also freezing our earned time for two weeks (leaving me with approx. 10 hours less of vacation this year) and canceling merit increases entirely for at least six months. Oh, and they're getting rid of the on-site subsidized child care, which doesn't affect me directly, but still sucks.
Once this round of layoffs is over, we can look forward to a second round once the Hunter Group is through "assessing our situation" in the first part of next year.
Even if my job survives through the two rounds of layoffs, is this going to end up being the kind of place I want to work? I'm not sure.
The thing is, if I had confidence in the hospital administration, if I believed that they'd sacrificed and worked and shed blood, sweat and tears to fix things before they took my earned time and deferred my raise and eliminated positions, I wouldn't mind so much that they're doing all of these things. But I don't believe that. I think that they're too busy trying to find ways to protect their own 800+ thousand dollar a year salaries.
I'm not supposed to say these things out loud. We've been instructed to maintain a steady front, to present an image to the public of a shiny, happy workplace.
Yeah. Right. Shiny and happy.
So. As a result, I'm now in the big questioning phase. Do I stay and stick it out and work my butt off--not for the hospital, but for the people in our department that I love and respect and the patients who still come around after all this crap goes down, or do I start to look for another job. And if I do look for another job, what kind of a job would it be? I'd love to not have to work full-time, to find a way to do some more serious writing (and yes, Mark, your email has put me in that place!), but I still have things like rent to pay and food to buy, so...
Decisions, decisions, decisions...
Oh well. Not going to get there tonight. Instead, I'm going home, where I will convince the Boyfriend to go to Doyle's with me so I can satisfy the turkey club sandwich craving I've been having for days, then I will curl up in my bed and watch the season premieres of Dawson's Creek and Felicity and go to sleep early.
Yeah. That's what I'm going to do. It seems like a much better plan than sitting here worrying.
(I wasn't even going to stay long enough to put this up, but I couldn't stand the thought of someone happening across my diary page for the first time and finding the blathering of a 14-year-old me, and thinking I wrote like that in here all the time!)
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