Public Employee Press

Coping with layoffs
First-round victory in SCA lawsuit

The union gained a firm foothold in its battle to reverse the School Construction Authority’s layoff of 160 technical workers when a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice denied the agency’s motion to dismiss the case.

“This means we will get our day in court,” said Local 375 President Claude Fort.

DC 37 and Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 sued the SCA, charging that the layoffs violated the state legislation that created the SCA. The law mandates that the in-house permanent staff of DC 37 members perform at least 40 percent of the engineering, design, drafting and inspection work on new city public schools.

When the SCA merged its operations with the Dept. of Education’s Division of School facilities last spring, it laid off Local 375 members and handed their jobs to higher paid consultants. The union contends that the agency padded the headcount by including supervisors who managed the consultants along with the permanent SCA staff to meet the 40 percent mandate.

So DC 37 fought back with a lawsuit to restore members’ jobs.

In a July decision, Justice Peter J. O’Donoghue rejected the SCA’s claim that the four-month time limit for filing the suit had expired for DC 37. He sided with the union and said the legislation requiring at least 40 percent of the work be performed by in-house technicians clearly states: Where the SCA seeks to contract out work above the minimum percentage reserved for SCA employees, on the grounds of cost effectiveness, the SCA is required to certify that “the contract will not cause displacement” of its permanent employees. And SCA never did that.

— DSW