So I go in and sit down with the boss yesterday and we have a talk. He's looking for ideas to cut payroll. He knows I come from management and I'm about the only other one in our company with a college degree. So I tell him about the Workshare program in NY State. It allows employers to cut employee hours and the state picks up half of the cut hours as an Unemployment benefit. So, if a worker gets his hours cut from 40 to 30 hours the state will pay for 5 of the hours, the other 5 hours goes unpaid. The employee gets paid for 35, only works 30, and the employer saves 10 hours of payroll per employee on this plan.

Well, the owner is doing it. My department probably won't be affected as we're the only ones making money, but the other 4 departments are all going to 30 hour work weeks. The owner will be saving huge dollars, and the employees will only get a few hours less pay and a day and a half off every week for the summer and fall, (or until business picks up).

The one negative. Since I'm the one that came up with the idea, I'm sure that a lot of people in the other departments will want to kill me. Yeah, there's a couple of bikers in the warehouse, so Yay. Good for me and my big mouth. Well, look at it this way, if I didn't propose this idea, 3 or 4 people would have been laid off out of 35 employees. That's 10% of the staff. So I saved jobs, I think...

We'll see how this plays out...