On Friday, most University employees will take the first of six mandatory furlough days set by the Board of Regents in August.

Furloughs – or days off, taken without pay – are the equivalent of up to a 3 percent pay cut. Although furloughs cut across all areas of campus, different sectors of the University face different challenges.

Athletics

Campus entities associated with the University’s football team encountered a unique obstacle in preparing for the Oct. 30 furlough day – the mandatory day off is the day before the game against the University of Florida.

Employees working with the Redcoat Band had to take their furlough day earlier in the month, said Dale Monson, director of the University’s Hugh Hodgson School of Music.

“This [furlough day] was a particular challenge,” Monson said in a phone interview last week. “But we think we have it worked out.”

The football coaches also took a different day off, said Frank Crumley, associate athletic director for finance and administration.

Though the coaches’ contracts through the Athletic Association technically freed them from taking furlough days, all of the coaches signed an amendment saying they would agree to be furloughed, Crumley said in a phone interview last week.

“Technically they had to volunteer to be furloughed, but participation was 100 percent,” he said. “They all knew it was the right thing to do.”

Research

Because no one is allowed to come onto campus for work on furlough days, some University researchers were initially concerned about what would happen to their projects.

“There will probably be experiments, ongoing experiments, that will need attention on furlough days,” said Barny Whitman, the department head for microbiology.

“For instance, they might be cloning a gene, and that’s a process that might take a couple of weeks to do different things on different days,” he said.

But Whitman said the department has a plan in place if a researcher needs to come in to take measurements or perform a task.

“There’s a procedure for making exceptions,” he said.

In the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Dean Scott Angle had to make exceptions for employees needing to care for animals.

On the University’s Tifton campus, for example, it’s calving season, and someone needs to be on site around the clock.

“We need a couple of people there every day to make sure the cows are not having problems giving birth,” Angle said. “If there is [a problem], we need to be sure we have someone there to help.”

But he said the overall planning process has been a straightforward task.

“It’s not been a difficult process,” he said. “For all the worry that we went through early on – when we were thinking about how this would all be implemented – the end result has been that it’s worked out pretty well.”

Families

For some University employees, furloughs mean a double hit to a household’s income.

Joe Dennis and his wife Carla are both paid by the University. Joe is the director of diversity and high school outreach in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Carla works for University Housing.

“We stand to lose quite a bit of income each month,” Joe said in a phone interview last week. “When you have a family of four – two child care bills and two children to take care of – it really makes it tight.”

He said the effects of the pay cut were especially difficult when the furlough days came in consecutive months.

“We’ll probably have to deplete our savings and maybe even reach into some credit cards to help offset the lost funds,” he said.

But he said he also understood furloughs were helping save jobs.

“We’re thankful to have work and to still be employed because we know many people who aren’t,” he said.