Shafted

I work for a proprietary school - don't ever do that, by the way. There are about 80 schools across the country under the same parent company. A lot of them were bought out and absorbed, so many were under different systems. They're now in the process of making all the schools uniform in policies. I can understand this logic to a certain extend (it breaks down when you realize that life is different from region to region and sometimes policies come about because they're more practical in certain settings, but that's another argument...) So now they want to put all the schools on the same pay schedule. This makes sense to me. However, they decided to take our school from being paid twice a month (15th and last day of the month) to every other week. This means were going from 24 pays a year to 26 pays a year. Can you see where this is going yet?

They decided to start the process in mid July. Because they're spreading out the pays, I'm getting $90 less each pay check for a nice total of $180 less each month. Because of the timing we don't see that nice extra third check of the month (with no deductions) until March. There are only two months out of the year where you get three pays a month - so at that time we then have to just budget the money to make it stetch. Fine, I can live with the responsibility. I used to be paid on this schedule at the last school I worked at. But 8 freakin months where we have to do with $180 less a month? People budget their money based on the pay they agreed to when they signed on - you buy something like a car where you have to pay in installments thinking you have the money to do it and BOOM, nearly $200 gone. What the fuck do you do? Can you tell that the people who make these decisions don't have to worry about such things?

They could have avoided the hardship just by waiting till January to start the new pay system. Assholes.