Public Employee Press

Hundreds of grievances
Union battles temp abuse

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The union is moving forward aggressively with its temp workers campaign, arguing its case at grievance hearings and stepping up an investigation of the city's growing reliance on temporary employment agencies.

DC 37 launched the campaign earlier this year, aiming to stop the city's widespread practice of assigning temp employees to do the work of civil servants.

"The city's out-of-control use of undertrained and inexperienced temp workers undermines public services and the civil service system," DC 37 Associate Director Henry Garrido said. "It's a glaring example of the Bloomberg administration's low-wage anti-union agenda."

So far, DC 37 has filed hundreds of grievances. Some hearings have occurred already, but union officials believe the bulk of the grievances will go to arbitration.

In recent years, the temp labor force has ballooned into a virtual shadow workforce with thousands of nonunion workers doing jobs that should be assigned to DC 37 members.

The city often evades the Long Beach court decision, which calls for replacing provisionals with civil service workers, by filling many of the spots with temps, instead.

"We are trying to get them out of the schools," said one of the staffers working on the campaign, Schools Division Council Rep Victoria Feola, who has filed 150 grievances dealing with temp workers in the public schools. "They are laying off our people and giving the work to nonunion temps."

Temps asleep on the job

Through her investigation of temp workers, Feola discovered that the Dept. of Education has started a program to recruit senior citizens to volunteer to replace Family Workers represented by Local 372.

"Big!" is how Council Rep Eddie Douglass of the Clerical-Administrative Division described the encroachment by temp workers on the jobs of Local 1549 members in public hospitals.

The division is focusing its work on the Human Resources Administration and the Health and Hospitals Corp. Douglass has represented the union at grievance hearings at Metropolitan, Lincoln, Woodhull, Bellevue and Kings County hospitals.

He is awaiting management's response to grievances at Elmhurst and Queens hospitals.

Hospitals Division Council Rep Sallie Stallings has filed grievances over Jacobi Hospital's employment of temps instead of union members in sitter jobs, watching over patients. For many years, Patient Care Associates and Patient Care Technicians in Local 420 have provided such care, but HHC is now assigning the responsibility to temp workers, she said.

Nurse's Aide Diane Massey, the vice chair of the Local 420 chapter at Jacobi, said the temp workers lack the skills of Local 420 members, who receive regular training for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, checking blood pressure and other vital signs, and phlebotomy. Stallings said Local 420 members have reported finding temps asleep on the job and otherwise inattentive while their patients are soaked with urine.

Chapter Chair Helena Lampropoulas, a Patient Care Associate, said using temps is a way of addressing a staff shortage without increasing the official headcount. She says HHC exploits the sitters, who generally are paid $8 to $10 an hour, don't receive benefits and can be summoned to work at any time.