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My thoughts concerning staff lay-offs. [1]

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Date: 2023-01-28

My thoughts can be divided into two parts: from the negotiation perspective and then from a fund raising path.

The negotiation perspective: I am not sure if this is a “captain obvious” view but I feel compelled to throw this out because of personal experience. Mr PK was on the negotiating team for his health care union. Over his thirty years of experience he has faced layoff situations on numerous contract negotiations. The philosophy in which they approached this was “how to minimize the pain by preserving as many positions as possible”. In practical terms this amounted to the following proposals (that were mostly effective):

Offer early retirement with full benefits for those that are close to the company’s retirement age.

Ask for voluntary lay-off for those employees that are willing to step down giving a generous severance package

Ask for voluntary reduced hours — go from full-time to 2/3 or half-time, for example with no loss of benefits.

Offer a Voluntary Time Off policy so that employees can take unpaid time off without losing seniority, vacation accumulation and other benefits.

All of these policies were aimed at preserving positions and sharing the pain so that once a turnaround occurs, the affected employees can return to their previous positions with minimal loss of seniority. And it fostered solidarity in that union members were willing to sacrifice a bit to preserve the positions of the at-risk employees (It is offered in the same spirit as sharing sick days to coworkers experience catastrophic health issues). It also had the benefit of allowing more time for job seeking for those employees that decide to look for more stable / desirable employers, while reducing the the competition for jobs by not dumping everyone into the job pool at the same time. It was felt that it was better to have 50 people at half-time jobs than 25 people completely lost, for example. Obviously not ideal but fostered an environment of “a hurt to one is a hurt to all”.

My fundraising idea is something that I have been thinking about for some time. I have read that POW camps in the WW2 era had formed “universities” so that prisoners could better endure the forced confinement. I am wondering if DK could offer the same type of learning catalog using members who are willing to share their knowledge and experience. Off-hand, some topics that could be interesting are lectures in political science, history, philosophy, religious studies, literature, art appreciation, music appreciation, HTML, cyber security, blog design, etc. And how-to classes, for example, on painting landscapes, gardening, woodworking, knitting / embroidery / crocheting, etc. In my case, I have a strong desire to delve into topics that I neglected during my college years.

I know that many diarists have addressed some (or most?) of the above topics already but am wondering if consolidating them into a “university” list that a DK user could peruse and then access for a small fee, to get an in depth college or technical school level experience could be a “thing”. I have no idea how this could work as far as compensating the authors / lecturers for their time — if people would donate their knowledge or not — so this idea is just thrown to stimulate creative solutions to loss of revenue.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/28/2149819/-My-thoughts-concerning-staff-lay-offs

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