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Posted by Mike Florio on March 6, 2009, 9:02 a.m.
At a time when more and more NFL teams are laying off employees during the ongoing economic downturn, the New York Jets have chosen an approach aimed at saving jobs.
Starting in mid-June, 60 employees will be placed on two-week unpaid furloughs. Essentially, it’s a vacation. Without pay.
The timing coincides with the only relatively slow period on the league’s calendar, after the conclusion of offseason workouts and prior to the preparations for training camp.
“Like every business, we’re facing challenges,” executive V.P. for business operations Matthew Higgins told Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. “But relatively speaking, we’re not in a state of crisis. We’re managing for the future.”
Higgins is one of the employees who will take a furlough.
“We’ve assembled a great deal of talent, and we’re at the crossroads of building our new stadium, so we didn’t want to be shortsighted,” Higgins said. “To let people go and then rebuild the team didn’t make sense. It was important to keep as many jobs as possible.”
Amen to that. The last thing that businesses need to be doing during times like this is panic. And as we’ve suggested in the past, we’ve got some suspicions as to whether some of these wildly profitable NFL franchises have been using the current climate as cover for cutting costs not in the name of planning or survival, but in the name of generating even more raw profit.
At a time when more and more NFL teams are laying off employees during the ongoing economic downturn, the New York Jets have chosen an approach aimed at saving jobs.
Starting in mid-June, 60 employees will be placed on two-week unpaid furloughs. Essentially, it’s a vacation. Without pay.
The timing coincides with the only relatively slow period on the league’s calendar, after the conclusion of offseason workouts and prior to the preparations for training camp.
“Like every business, we’re facing challenges,” executive V.P. for business operations Matthew Higgins told Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. “But relatively speaking, we’re not in a state of crisis. We’re managing for the future.”
Higgins is one of the employees who will take a furlough.
“We’ve assembled a great deal of talent, and we’re at the crossroads of building our new stadium, so we didn’t want to be shortsighted,” Higgins said. “To let people go and then rebuild the team didn’t make sense. It was important to keep as many jobs as possible.”
Amen to that. The last thing that businesses need to be doing during times like this is panic. And as we’ve suggested in the past, we’ve got some suspicions as to whether some of these wildly profitable NFL franchises have been using the current climate as cover for cutting costs not in the name of planning or survival, but in the name of generating even more raw profit.
