University of Miami to Cut 800 Jobs

When it comes to the city of Miami you think about the sand, the sun and the surf. You might also think about some of the amazing tropical drinks and your last vacation. When one goes looking for the reputation of the University of Miami one does not find a reputation that is based on an amazing academic program, innovative research or a world-class externship program. The reputation of the University of Miami is as one student put it, “suntan U”, or as another student listed the schools charms  for young in the following terms, “Studying at Miami allows you to mix academics, with a WORLD CLASS PARTY SCENE!”

Well it looks like the academics at the school are going to take a fairly big hit as the school is getting ready to trim back on their staff by several hundred workers. The school is getting ready to cut back its payrolls by almost 800 members of the staff. This job cut, which is large enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines several times over, the University of Miami is required to put out The Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification or WARN notices.

These notices are designed to give workers some time to find new jobs before they are taken off of the payroll at their current jobs. This move is meant to help the community to not have the mass layoff action have too adverse of an impact on the surrounding area. In the current long-term economic downturn however the odds of a significant amount of the workers finding new jobs before the deadline is unlikely to happen. The workers will be put out of a job by the 31^st of July. All of the jobs to be cut will come from the workers of the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine.

The University of Miami did, in an amazing move for transparency, give a complete list of all of the job cuts. Here is a look at the list:

• Research administration: 150
• Scheduling: 145
• Research staff: 110
• General administration, non-clinical: 110
• Building management and construction: 55
• Clinical area reorganization: 50
• Human resources: 50
• Information technology: 40
• Office, program, division administrative support: 25
• Communications, marketing and development: 20
• Faculty practice plan business operations: 20
• Health information management: 12
• Finance and accounting: 8
• Billing, collections, insurance and coding: 5

While 800 may be, on an objective scale, a large number of jobs when it comes to the percentage of workers the university is not even getting rid of ten percent of its staff. It is estimated that the university employs about 13,000 workers. In 2011 the university reported an operating revenue of about $2.34 billion. The school is, for the time being, attributing the job cuts to an overall decrease in the amount of the grant funding for the school on the whole. The medical school received more than 50 percent of the overall grant funding of the school in the past.