Union claims win on overtime question

LANSING — An arbiter has ruled hundreds of Michigan Department of Health & Human Services employees should be paid more for work they do from home.

Ray Holman, legislative liaison for the United Auto Workers Local 6000, said Sunday Adult Protective Services and Child Protective Services workers now will be compensated for more of the time they spend handling emergencies from home during on-call overnight and weekend shifts.

DHHS spokesman Bob Wheaton said in an email to the State Journal there are about 1,600 protective services employees.

The department still is reviewing the decision, Wheaton said, but he called called the ruling a split decision: “In some instances employees may be eligible for call back pay, in others they would not be,” he said.

In a statement, the UAW said the arbiter disagreed that the special pay should begin as soon as the worker takes a call. The work must be “substantial,” the union said. Employees would have to request the special pay and each request would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

“It can’t just be simply the phone rings and you get the pay,” Holman said. “It has be something comes up.”

But Jim Walkowicz, the union’s chairman of the DHHS labor/management team, said Monday that employees perform substantial work during on-call shifts.

“Sometimes people were spending hours working on cases, and these were serious cases — you don’t get a call at midnight because somebody’s got a bruise on their finger,” Walkowicz said.

Wheaton said the department doesn’t plan to appeal, “at this point.”

Protective service workers in each DHHS office rotate on-call shifts to cover emergencies. If, for example, police raid a drug house at midnight and children must be removed from the home, or if an Alzheimer’s patient is found wandering the streets at 4 a.m. and needs emergency care, the on-call workers are phoned. Some of their work can be handled from home over the phone or on a laptop; some of the work has to happen in the field.

Before the arbiter’s decision, on-call workers were entitled to one hour of regular pay for every five hours of an on-call shift, and a minimum of three hours overtime if they went into the field or to the office.

DHHS officials had argued that the regular on-call pay covered work the employees did from home, but the arbiter — noting that mobile technology allows employees to perform more tasks remotely — ruled on Sept. 10 that workers should receive the same overtime time pay for performing significant tasks at home as they would for going into the office or the field.

Holman said nighttime homework includes phoning families, police and other DHHS offices, checking and maintaining records online, and more.

The overtime-for-field-work-only system was decades old, but issues arose when Adult Protective Services workers, unaware of that arrangement, joined Child Protective Services workers in the on-call rotations last year. Some 40 grievances were ultimately filed starting in August 2014.

The arbiter considered six specific cases from around the state and sided with the union on five of those cases. But the ruling “sets a precedent and can be used by all on-call workers,” the UAW said.

Wheaton wasn’t immediately sure how much the decision could cost the state. He said a handful of employees could be eligible for back pay.

The protective service employees make between $21 and $31 an hour, according to the Michigan Civil Service Commission.

Contact Justin A. Hinkley at (517) 377-1195 or jhinkley@lsj.com . Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley .