PostdocPartum #3: Disaster never rests
{550 words, 3 minutes}
It's Week 12 of my postdoc and there have been some fairly unfortunate developments at the Institute for Energy Technology/Institutt for Energiteknikk (IFE). I don't really want to dwell on this topic much, so I'll try to keep to the point.
IFE has not done well budget-wise this year. There are several factors that are putting combined financial pressure on the bottom-line; some are internal, like accounting or reactor problems, while others are external, like the market prices of oil and irradiated silicon boules (giant, meter-length crystals). Over several of the past weeks, the leadership has held several meetings to describe the process of saving the budget to the employees. Eventually, they recently decided on the fiscal measures required and announced layoffs. That much I was able to understand despite the meetings being entirely in Norwegian.
I'm not surprised by this. I lived through 2008. Hell, I interned at Ford Motor Company in the summer of 2008, as its stock price crashed to its lowest in 20-some years and layoffs hit people all around me in the Scientific Research Laboratory. What did surprise me is the extent of layoffs. IFE employed about 650 staff. The official numbers are 127 affected employees, with 29 full-time layoffs and 98 half-time layoffs. At Kjeller, one of two IFE sites and where I work, there were 55 layoffs. Twenty percent of staff is a massive number but, interestingly, by design to spread the burden. It may a sign of the Norwegian cultural mindset to socialize costs, but it does create more dissension.
Since my project is solely funded by the Research Council of Norway, I can say with certainty that my job is safe (and is in some indirect way a method of potential future income to IFE through future grants, patents, intellectual property, etc.). However, that doesn't mean I'm not affected. One of the primary motivating factors for my accepting the postdoc in Norway was the local access to a nuclear reactor and more precisely, access to a neutron source for materials characterization. Now, one of the consequences of these layoffs, which disproportionately hit the reactor staff due to financial costs being concentrated in that sector, is losing at a minimum of four weeks' of reactor time on top of the normal winter downtime. November will be the last month of reactor uptime and the restart of the reactor in 2017 has yet to be determined.
I don't know what the moral of this post is. Economics on micro- and macroscales have such strong influences on the lives of people and their career paths and yet we have such little control of these massive and unpredictable forces. My internship experience at Ford, both with its positive and negative aspects like severe layoffs during the 2008 economic crisis, strongly influenced my decision to apply to graduate school, a decision which has thus far determined 25% of my life (and 70% of my adult life). The impact of these layoffs on my experience at IFE (and more broadly, my decision to go to Norway) won't be apparent until much later. Perhaps, because of my funding source, I won't have any blowbacks to my career progress. Perhaps a much greater future crisis will dwarf this one. The only certainty is uncertainty.
Thus far in life, I can gather this much: stay humble and save money. Disaster never rests.
