Public Employee Press

Temp campaign
Mass Grievances
DC 37 strikes back at the city over widespread use of "permatemps."

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The union in March filed a mass of grievances citing contract violations in its initial salvo in a new campaign to combat the city's increasing use of temporary workers. "Temp workers have become part of the permanent municipal workforce," said DC 37 Associate Director Henry Garrido, who is coordinating the campaign. "That's unacceptable."

As Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg noted with pride in his January State of the City address, the city has reduced its workforce by 20,000 since he took office 10 years ago. But at the same time, the number of temps doing the work of civil servants has grown by a similar number.

Since late last year, Grievance Reps and Council Reps from the union's field divisions have gathered information from members on what jobs temp workers are doing. This workplace intelligence provided the basis for grievances. The Schools, Hospitals, Clerical-Administrative, White Collar and Professional divisions worked on the grievances.

The grievances cite violations of protections spelled out in the nonwage agreements known as unit contracts, which cover workers according to their job titles and work sites. The union has about a dozen unit contracts dedicated to such areas as hospitals, social services and clerical-administrative work.

The grievances charge that employing permanent temporary workers -"permatemps" - violates "union recognition" clauses that assign specific tasks and responsibilities to unionized workers.

In the past, the city used temp workers to fill in for civil servants for short periods. But now the city keeps on thousands of permatemps while it downsizes its offi cial workforce. The practice has accelerated since the 2007 Long Beach court case, which requires municipalities to follow civil service law requiring that provisional workers be replaced by civil service employees after nine months.

The union has also filed "reverse out-of-title" grievances to challenge the city's temp practices. Ordinary out-of-title grievances involve workers who are assigned the tasks of employees in higher pay grades. In reverse out-of-title grievances, the union charges that other workers are doing the work of aggrieved employees in lower pay grades, choking off employment and promotional opportunities.

Other city violations cited in the grievances prepared by the legal team of the temp campaign include filling job openings without posting the vacancies and failing to discuss the use of temps with the union.

The grievances have hit the Education and Fire Depts., the Human Resources Administration, the Administration of Children's Services and the Health and Hospitals Corp. The grievances include more than 50 work locations.

Sheila Williams, an Eligibility Specialist in Clerical-Administrative Employees Local 1549, is a former temp worker who works at HRA's Flatbush food stamps office.

Williams said she was sympathetic to the city's employment of temp workers insofar as it offers needy people a job opportunity. But she also recognized that "the city wants to save a lot of money by not paying health insurance" for the temps.

Williams expressed her support for the union's practice of urging temp workers to take civil service exams so that they can become permanent unionized workers.

"We've initiated this campaign to protect our members from something that's happening nationwide, replacing permanent workers with decent pay and benefits with lower-cost temporary employees," Garrido said.

"As unionists, we don't have anything against the temp workers as individuals, because many of them are exploited and they need to feed their families," Garrido said. "But the growth of the permatemp industry is yet another force undermining our country's middle-class jobs and threatening our collective bargaining rights. That growth must be stopped."