Public Employee Press

Member wins promotion to Pharmacy Tech

Institutional Aide Sebastian Joseph was promoted to Pharmacy Technician in May after DC 37 reps met with Coler Hospital management about his frequent and extended out-of-title assignments.

"We did not have to file a grievance. It took a number of labor-management meetings, but finally they agreed to move him into the higher-paying Pharmacy Tech title, since he was qualified," said Hospitals Division Council Rep Sallie Stallings.

Joseph started as an Institutional Aide in 1999. But for months at a time when the hospital was short of staff, management assigned him to deliver medication to patients and other Pharmacy Tech duties.

HHC Pharmacy Technicians deliver and maintain records of prescriptions, medication and IV solutions. They earn about $5,200 more annually than IAs.

Joseph could have kept silent and continued working out of title, but as a union member he decided to let DC 37 and Local 420 fight for him.

Stallings was filing a grievance against Coler management for abuses that included using workers from temporary agencies to perform the jobs and duties of DC 37 members in civil service titles - a problem the union is battling in many city agencies - when Local 420 Chapter Chair Anita Holder told her about Joseph's
situation.

Mistakenly assuming Joseph was a temp, Coler managers even threatened to terminate him, Stallings said, until the union made his civil service status clear, and she asked Joseph to testify at an arbitration hearing on the temp problem at HHC.

Holder, Stallings and Mark Heron, an assistant director in the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept., met with officials in HHC's Office of Labor Relations on Joseph's situation.

"The timing was right," Holder said. "Coler was redeploying staff to HHC's new Carter facility in Harlem, and we resolved this matter for good." About two months later, Coler upgraded Joseph to work in the Pharmacy Dept. permanently.