Fridays Are Furlough Days

Abstract

Recently, many state and local governments have implemented furloughs as a major strategy to deal with budget crises. Furloughs are often used as a temporary tool by which organizations try to save costs and at the same time, minimize layoffs. It is little known whether furloughs have the same impact on management as other cutback measures. This study examines furlough issues in public organizations with a more holistic view, from formulation of policy, to implementation, to outcome evaluation. We employed a survey of 273 employees in six state agencies. We found that furloughs have a significant individual impact on job satisfaction, financial burden, workload, and career stability while individual work performance, basically, did not change. However, the impact on an organizational level seemed limited—employees were more likely to view furloughs as “reasonable.”