Nov 20th, 2003, 04:03 PM
None of it, really. Some people are hired for a speciffic grant funded project, and while it increases their chances at picking up another job, when the project is over so is their job, and that's the terms of employment.
Most of us, however, are hired not for a speciffic project, but by the Mueum itself. In the last round of layoffs, the President of the Museum, with the approval of the Board of trustees, went to the VP's and said we need to cut X dollars out of each of your budgets, and I want it to be ion the form of salaries. The VP's then pretty much forced the managers to pick who they were going to lay off. We have a new president now and maybe he won't be so quick to save money in the form of staff. Who knows.
My department, the one I was hired into after I got layed off last time has a lot more lattitude than most. We've always worked on a project by project basis, the way the whole Museum is supposed to be moving now. What thaat means is a lot of our pay doesn't come out of the genral operating budget anyway. It's various grants we've competed for to complete various projects. Functionally this means that as one project ends, an employee's labor costs are picked up by the project he's moving on to. The President can't really save any money by terminating us.
They could trim us by saying you have to cover all your bases with one less designer, one less planner, one less tech designer; and ask our project grants to carry us further, and they may do this. There's only one administrative assistant for all the projects though, and that's me.
The biggest danger, and under our last Pres it deffinitely would have happened, is trending. If the Aquarium lays of, say forty people, then the ice has been broken and we can lay of forty. He was a real bastard, and the fact that the people left were too few to get the job done never concerned him much. I'm hoping the new guy has a little more vision.
I'm guessing this is more than anyone ever wanted to know about Museum politics.
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