NEW YORK — Here's the vacation no one wants, courtesy of the recession: forced time off without pay.
Financially struggling universities, factories and even hospitals are requiring employees to take unpaid "furloughs" -- temporary layoffs that amount to one-time pay cuts for workers and a cost savings for employers. This year, the number of temporarily laid off workers hit a 17-year high.
"If they do it once, I think it's easier for them to try to do it again," said Carrie Swartout, who researches traumatic brain injuries at the University of Maryland Medical Center, which is private and nonprofit.
Maryland is requiring unpaid time off for 67,000 of its 80,000 employees as it struggles with a budget crisis. The state says the furloughs will save an estimated $34 million this fiscal year.
State governments, facing lower revenues but stymied by the long process required to cut public sector jobs, are using furloughs as a quick way to trim payrolls. Private-sector businesses -- from automakers to small businesses -- are shutting down factories and offices.
The temporary layoffs are "kind of employment purgatory, but it's better than the alternative," said Carl Van Horn, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University. They're a typical response to decreasing demand in a recession, although this round is worse than past recessions, Van Horn said.
Of 10.3 million unemployed workers in November, roughly 12% were unemployed because of temporary layoffs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last time this many workers fell into the category was February 1991, when 1.4 million workers were unemployed because of temporary layoffs. As a proportion of the total workforce, workers on temporary layoff are roughly 1%, nearly the same now as 17 years ago.
The numbers, based on a Census Bureau survey of households, likely understate temporary layoffs. The survey asks about participants' working hours during the prior week, so a worker who knows he faces a temporary layoff later in the month would not be included.
Swartout, the 28-year-old Maryland researcher, could lose as much as $800 in pay, or nearly 2% of her salary, depending on how long she's furloughed. "That's a huge chunk," she said.
Although employees paid directly by the hospital will not be furloughed, some researchers connected to the hospital, such as Swartout, hold state-funded positions and will be forced to take unpaid vacation.
