Christmas vacation! No freakin' way!

[chanaleh]

The MIT Powers That Be announced this morning that the Institute will be officially closed from Christmas to New Year's. Starting with the usual Christmas holiday on Thursday, Dec. 25, 2003; reopening Monday, January 5, 2004.

Additional paid vacation time!

This is in conjunction with announcement of a salary freeze, "staff reductions" over the coming year, etc. Still! Dude! Where shall we go? :-)

(Okay, in all likelihood I'll use it to make some kind of pilgrimage to Indiana... but who knows?)

Comments

nice!

[adamosity.livejournal.com]

Random thoughts:

1) Lots of companies here do that as UNPAID vacation time to save money.

2) A pilgramage is always nice. I was lucky--I had a vacation close to your size (starting one day earlier) and managed to talk my psycho boss into letting me start the Friday before.

3) If MIT, a private university with a zillion dollars in research contracts and endowment, doesn't have money--who does? Something's wrong when the rich people can't set up and manage a bureaucracy. I don't believe companies/organizations are ever broke--I think they're cheap, and it's only because the labor market is so insanely bad that they get away with it. I went to an uni that went through all of that due to state funding cuts, but they survived.

Every large organization is forever having staff reductions. Yet, the staff they keep are the higher-paid ones who are also often the worst workers. Of course, the CEO/President gets a raise equal to at least ten times what the workers get, or better yet, the money saved from firing workers goes into his pocket.

I don't buy it anymore, if I ever did.

--adam

[navrins]

Point of information - much of MIT's endowment is tied up in the stock market, so was hit pretty hard. Before that they committed to a lot of expensive construction projects that can't really be cancelled mid-construction. Research contracts don't always (maybe even usually) pay for their full overhead. And they're not doing much laying off. MIT is not rich the way Harvard is.

This doesn't make me happy about getting a pitiful raise this year and none next year, of course. But I don't think they're being particularly evil.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Sounds delightful, but make sure it really is paid vacation. One of my recent cash-strapped former employers started an unpaid forced-leave holiday policy recently...

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Nope, nope, the phrase "additional paid vacation time" is taken directly from the memo.

[navrins]

*I* want to go somewhere. With friends. Preferably somewhere not clogged with Christmas tourists, especially young loud ones.

[skreeky]

Fab! It's one of the things that keeps me appeased at Emmanuel.

When I was at MIT, not only did we not get a paid winter break, we didn't even get the day after Thankgiving unless we counted it against vacation time!

I have to say, when an enthusiastic "Where shall we go?" is put forth, "Indiana" is rarely the best possible answer... ;-)
(I have family there too, I really do get it.)

[navrins]

Better than "New Jersey," where my family is.

[coraline]

dude. wish lincoln was doing that :p