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PEP Feb 2006
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Public Employee Press

Local 1457 prez wins suspension battle with DJJ

The Dept. of Juvenile Justice agreed to restore all but one day of its 60-day suspension of Local 1457 President Alex Parker following an escape by a resident at a detention facility.

The union agreed to the one-day penalty after three days of hearings made clear that DJJ’s attempt to blame the escape on Parker — the tour commander at the time of incident at Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx on July 19, 2004 — rested on questionable grounds.

The hearings showed that Horizon lacked procedures to deal with security breaches. The staff was hamstrung by a broken-down video monitoring system. The youth — caught a few months later when he was allegedly involved in another crime — had slipped through a hatch that had no alarm and jumped off the roof, which didn’t have barbed wire.

To improve relations
“When we were offered the settlement for a one-day suspension, it seemed like the best thing to do in terms of improving labor relations,” Parker said. Attorney Leonard A. Shrier handled the arbitration.

“It didn’t make sense for the local to pay to continue the case when we were only talking about one day’s pay,” Parker said. “Anyone who reads between the lines of the settlement can see that I’ve been vindicated.”

“Of course they tried to blame this on the front-line staff, when it is management’s responsibility to have a system in place,” Parker said. While DJJ fired or suspended about five other workers, it hasn’t held any managers accountable.

During the arbitration process, the union charged that the agency was particularly harsh with Parker because of his aggressive leadership. Local 1457 has denounced understaffing, waged a public campaign about assaults on the job and sued DJJ in federal court over its failure to properly credit workers’ sick leave, leave time and overtime.

Parker said he prepared for the hardship of going without pay by putting himself on a strict budget as DJJ investigated the escape, anticipating that management would target him with a harsh penalty.

 

 
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