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Public Employee Press
Safety net for laid-off
members
Layoff procedures: Know your rights
COMPETITIVE CLASS EMPLOYEES
- Layoff procedures for permanent
civil servants are governed by the Civil Service Law.
- Civil Service Law requires
that all provisionals in a layoff title must be terminated prior
to any permanent incumbent being laid off.
- Layoffs of competitive class
employees in the same title must take place in the following order:
provisionals, probationers, permanents.
- Provisional (pure and step-up)
and temporary employees can be terminated without regard to seniority.
Provisionals who have two or more years of service do not have greater
rights to remain employed than those who have less than two years
of service. Step-up provisionals have no greater rights to remain
employed than pure provisionals; however they can return to their
permanent title.
- Permanent per-diems have the
same Civil Service Law protections as permanent (per-annum) civil
servants.
SECURITY
- Civil service seniority is
the governing factor in the layoff of permanent and probationary
employees.
- Although seniority is based
on total continuous service, it is applied within each layoff unit,
for each title for which layoffs are contemplated. For example,
assuming there are no provisional Accountants anywhere in the City,
one agency can lay off permanent Accountants with 10 years of service,
even though another agency has permanent Accountants with 2 years
of service.
- Regardless of seniority, probationary
competitive class employees in each layoff unit are laid off before
any permanent employees.
- Seniority is based upon the
first date of permanent service in the classified service (competitive,
non-competitive, exempt, labor-class), in which probation has been
completed, followed by continuous service.
- Civil Service Law allows for
additional seniority for eligible veterans, disabled veterans, and
spouses of disabled veterans. Persons who are blind receive absolute
preference in retention.
- Seniority date ties are broken
in the following ways: those employees hired from a civil service
list with an earlier established date are given priority over those
hired from a later established list. Within each list, employees
are ranked in order of their list number.
SPECIAL TRANSFER LISTS
- In lieu of layoff, permanent/probationary
employees are placed on a Special Transfer List whenever provisional
employees are serving elsewhere in the City in the same or similar
titles or where vacancies exist in such titles.
- Appointments from Special
Transfer Lists must be made in number order. The one-in-three
rule does not apply.
Employees must be transferred at their current salary.
- If the number of provisionals
is insufficient to exhaust the entire Special Transfer List, then
DCAS may make such list appropriate to a different title where there
are provisionals serving.
- Employees whose names are
certified from Special Transfer Lists and who decline a job offer
will instead be bumped down to a lower title, if applicable (employee
must have served in such lower title, and passed probation, and
must have greater seniority than the employee in the lower title
who is to be displaced), or laid off and placed on an Agency Preferred
List and a Citywide Preferred List.
BUMPING
- Permanent and probationary
employees have bumping rights. This means that they can displace
a permanent/probationary employee with less seniority in a lower
title in the same layoff unit. If there are no lower level occupied
positions in the direct line of promotion then the employee may
displace an employee in a title previously held that is in another
occupational group.
- Employees who hold permanent
competitive leave lines, and are laid off from step-up provisional,
non-competitive or labor class positions will return to their permanent
competitive leave titles.
- In those cases, where an employee
is bumped to a lower title, they must receive a salary equal to
that which would have been received had the employee served in the
lower title all along. However, at the agencys discretion,
the employee may continue to receive their former salary, as long
as it is not greater than the maximum of their new title.
NON-COMPETITIVE CLASS / LABOR
CLASS EMPLOYEES
- Non-competitive and labor
class employees are laid off in inverse order of the date of their
original appointment to the agency in the layoff title.
- Seniority ties are broken
by Social Security number, derived from a sequence of the last five
and then the first four digits, with the lowest number receiving
the greatest seniority.
- An agency can set different
layoff units for labor class or non-competitive employees, meaning
that the layoff unit may be a bureau or division of the larger agency.
- Within a particular title,
all probationary employees must be laid off before those who have
completed probation.
- Non-competitive and labor
class and labor class employees who are veterans or exempt volunteer
firefighters have rights to be placed on a Citywide Transfer List
for similar vacant positions in other agencies.
- Non-competitive employees
who are laid off have their names placed on an agency recall list
in seniority order.
Employees remain on such list up to a maximum of four years from
the date of layoff.
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