Fermilab workers start unpaid leaves Feb. 1

Rolling unpaid furloughs will start Feb. 1 at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, its director announced Wednesday.

The mandatory unpaid leaves, affecting about 1,900 people, will last through September, when a new budget year begins, unless cuts to Fermilab's current budget are restored by Congress.

Salaried workers will have to take off one full week every two months. Hourly workers will have to take off two days per month.

And well-meaning employees are not supposed to do any work from home during those furlough days, including checking their work e-mail and phone messages.

Director Pier Oddone, speaking to the citizens task force for the International Linear Collider Tuesday, said sending 10 percent of the work force home is likely to slow down work. For example, if a piece of machinery in the Tevatron particle accelerator breaks, and the expert on that machine is off on furlough, repairs would have to wait.

He also warned that there could still be outright layoffs at the laboratory.

Oddone said one option being pursued with federal legislators is attaching a restoration of funds to the economic stimulus package the president has proposed. But he is pessimistic about the chances of that happening.

Another is getting in to the supplemental appropriations bill that is typically passed in April.

In December, Fermilab learned it would be getting $33 million less than it did in fiscal year 2007. The news came when the lab was already a quarter of the way through fiscal year 2008.

The budget for research and development work on the collider was cut 75 percent, so work on that has come to a stop. Funding for the NOvA neutrino experiment was eliminated. Workers from those efforts have been reassigned to other projects at the laboratory.

The rolling furlough is expected to save about as much money as closing the laboratory for a month.

Off: Fermilab director warns of work delays