A lot of bad business tends get started out here in California, where the Workforce Management world headquarters is located.

While a lot of these trends are groundbreaking and noteworthy, others are simply frivolous, shortsighted or plain wrongheaded.

And they give people east of the Sierras the sense that everybody who lives here in California must be a complete and total lunatic.

Here is another one of those trends, and it’s a doozy: The Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a division of Denver-based MediaNews, sent out a memo telling all nonunion employees that “for at least the next three months, they won’t earn vacation,” according to the blog LAObserved.com.

 Fred Hamilton, one of the publishers in the group, wrote to his staff that this decision was yet “another step our newspapers are taking to tackle the difficult economic challenges that we are facing. In short, we’ll be suspending accrual of employee vacation time from April 5, 2009 through July 4, 2009.”

Now, vacation isn’t a God-given right, but as we have noted here at Workforce Management, it is a “cornerstone benefit … that should be examined as [a] potential tool for employers to use in boosting recruiting and retention efforts especially when budgets and bottom lines are being carefully scrutinized.”

It’s also extremely popular with employees, and “studies have found that given a choice between more time off or more money, roughly half of those polled would select time off.”

I’ve worked for a lot of different employers, and even the most stingy and miserly of the bunch had some sort of reasonable vacation policy. And although it is not out of line for an organization to change or make a vacation policy more restrictive, I’ve never, ever heard of a company doing it in the middle of the year.

Smart organizations work to carefully manage highly negative news like this, generally giving workers plenty of advance warning, guidance and counsel from management about exactly why it is necessary. Getting in front of the issue and talking it through can help a company get people to buy in to the larger business need for doing something like this, even if they don’t personally agree with it.

This isn’t the first time that MediaNews and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group have abruptly dumped a terrible workforce policy change on their employees.

Right around this time last year, they ordered more than 100 full-time newsroom professionals to report to a job site different from the one they were hired at, sometimes as far as 40 miles away. This was also dropped on workers without any warning, and the message from upper management then, as it is now, was “tough luck if it causes upheaval in your life.”

I understand that companies are being forced to make a lot of difficult and unprecedented decisions to get through the bad economic recession we are in. No one likes the notion of furloughs or unpaid vacations, or pay and salary cuts. And I’m sure the organizations that are having to resort to them would be the first to say that they were not decisions that made easily.

That is surely true, but it is also just one more thing that will demoralize and depress a workforce, especially since so many workers put so much stock in getting paid time off. And as the most recent MetLife Annual Employee Benefits Trend survey pointed out, “In this environment, benefits are taking on a heightened importance for most workers.”

Plus, any manager worth his salt knows that workers are no different from any other animal on this planet. They need time off the job to rest, refresh and rejuvenate. Good companies recognize this basic human need and plan for it, and that’s why vacation is such a cornerstone of almost any forward-thinking benefits plan.

I pray that this terrible idea won’t spread from California like a noxious virus, but in this economic environment, who knows? If we’ve learned anything from this downturn, it’s that there’s no end to the kooky, shortsighted cost-saving “strategies” that organizations can come up with. Let’s hope this is one that doesn’t take on a life of its own.

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