Sharing Work to Avoid Layoffs SEATTLE, WA (KPLU) - If you had a choice between losing your job or taking a small pay cut and working fewer hours for a while, what would you do? The choice was obvious for workers at one Seattle company once they found out it was possible. Their managers have enrolled in a program offered by the state Employment Security Department.

The program is called "Shared Work" and the idea is pretty simple. Instead of laying off workers, an employer can cut back their hours, from say 40 to 32 hours one week. Then the worker gets a bit of unemployment compensation from the state and keeps his or her job.

"If I was to be laid off it would be hard times for me to find anything that would be comparable in pay, " says Michael Bowman, a 30-year old apprentice machinist at The Gear Works in south Seattle.

He earns $24 an hour plus health and dental benefits.

"My wife's pregnant and I have a 3-year-old son and it'd be really tough to try to keep the house and all that stuff goin'," he says.

He now works four days instead of five. But he's one of 95 hourly workers who've been able to stay on the payroll. Last year, The Gear Works laid off eight people before they heard about the possibility of shared work from one of their vendors who had done it too. Company President Sterling Ramberg says they've been in survival mode. But, as he explained at a news conference during their morning coffee break, cutting trained workers isn't smart.

"The investment that we put into the employees over the years - you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars go into training just one employee - is enormous."

He says it's worth dealing with a lot of faxes back and forth to Olympia to get into the shared work program because he's retaining a workforce he's confident he'll soon need back at full force. He wants to help get the word out that this program works especially well for manufacturers. Here in Washington, each company can draw the benefits for a total of 52 weeks. For The Gear Works that means until next spring. By then, they hope their orders for big metal gears that go into wind turbines and construction equipment will pick up. And they might even get back to occasionally needing some overtime.

Information about the program is available online at www.esd.wa.gov, search on "shared work," or by phone at 800-752-2500 © Copyright 2010, KPLU