The language is set, but the future of furloughs at Eastern is still unclear.

President Perry announced a finalized furlough policy on Jan. 28 via e-mail. As part of the internal governing policies, the new furlough policy does not require approval from the board of trustees.

Employees covered by bargaining contracts will not be affected unless the contract has a furlough clause.

Currently, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 981 Clerical/Technical Chapter is the only union on campus with furlough language in its contract.

“Still, with the language in there, the university would have to sit down and bargain over the impact of the furlough before they implement it with that unit,” said Matt Pederson, the union’s president. “Before they implemented the furlough, the union would notify Eastern they wanted to sit down and bargain over the impact. We could look at different ways we could do it; we could suggest how it would be implemented for our folks. We would hopefully have some input on how it would proceed from that point.”

Perry said that unions without furlough language would be subject to layoffs if salary savings became necessary.

“There are some people within the bargaining unit that feel furloughs are the best way to go, but I think the majority of them think letting the civil service system, layoffs and letting seniority decide, is important,” Pederson said.

Some faculty members feel the opposite way about layoffs.

Members of University Professionals of Illinois, the faculty union, think the affect of layoffs would be significant.

“There are two big ‘cons’ to layoffs; first, people lose jobs in a horrible market and second, they could seriously impact the university’s ability to offer courses, depending on how they were done,” said history professor Jonathan Coit. “Fewer faculty means fewer courses available, which may mean less tuition revenue coming in.”

Furloughs would not as easily impact the number of classes offered, but would affect the daily class operations, said UPI president and English professor John Allison.

“It stands to reason that furloughs would probably reduce preparation time for classes, contact hours with students and support services for students,” Allison said. “In general, furloughs would likely reduce Eastern’s ability to carry forward its mission.”

Pederson said some support services are already beginning to suffer because of the hiring freeze.

“Right now, food service – the cooks and kitchen laborers – run pretty much bare bones now, as far as staffing goes,” Pederson said. “It’s all they can do to keep up with the service demand of the students now. If you start furloughing out of there, how is that going to get done? Can you imagine two or three cooks trying to cook for 800 or 900 hundred kids?”

While the influence on classes would be significant, Allison cannot see how the impact on the budget would be significant enough.

“One can see how relatively little impact furloughs have on university budget,” Allison said. “The problems will improve only when the state provides the funding that the state allocated for public higher education for Illinois citizens.”

The lack of state allocated payments coming in is the source of the budget crisis.

“It’s difficult to talk about reducing people’s pay or the work they can do when the real problem is in Springfield,” said history professor Sace Elder.

The university has made its financial needs known to the state with little success. Pederson said he believes it is time to take more drastic action.

“I think there needs to be more pressure on the state to make the funding available to Eastern that they owe them,” Pederson said. “When you’re appropriated $50 million, and the university’s only received less than a third, you’d be better served to load up the buses, go to Springfield and sit on the governor’s doorstep and demand that he meets his obligations.”

Sarah Ruholl can be reached at 581-7942 or at [email protected].