Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘public employment’

Great moments in California public employee tenure

California public employees can appeal to the little-known Personnel Board to challenge terminations. Among those ordered reinstated: “A nurse’s aide accused of stealing money from an elderly patient and a hospital staffer who allegedly beat a disabled patient with a shoe.” Replete with examples, this is the sort of investigative piece that ought to make a difference, though alas it probably won’t [Los Angeles Times]

More: At The American, Lee Ohanian has a fact-packed overview of “America’s public sector union dilemma.” Fred Siegel is interviewed by Matthew Kaminski on New York City and public sector unions as the “New Tammany Hall” [WSJ] SEC chief Mary Schapiro says firing failed employees would “harm” the agency [Mark Calabria, Cato]. And Jonah Goldberg discovers that, especially in California, there really is something to this talk of a “prison-industrial complex.”

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Great moments in public sector unionism

“U Raise ‘Em/We Cage ‘Em” t-shirts from a California law enforcement union [Radley Balko] From the same source, “NYPD cops demand the right to be corrupt.” And on Friday at Cato at Liberty, I gave my take on Ohio’s vote today on whether to approve a package of laws reining in public employee unionism.

More on Ohio’s S.B. 5, including political post-mortem: Michael Barone, Mark Steyn, Ted Frank, Mickey Kaus, Mytheos Holt. Philip K. Howard points out in the WSJ that the LIRR’s disability epidemic is “hardly unique – 82% of senior California state troopers are ‘disabled’ in their last year before retirement” [WSJ; more on LIRR, Nicole Gelinas] Radley Balko has another revealing police union vignette, this time from an incident in which an off-duty cop led another cop on a high-speed chase. And from Brian Strow [Western Kentucky], “Stop, Drop, and Roll: The Privileged Economic Position of Firefighters” [Library of Economics and Liberty]

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L.I.R.R. disability scandal

The abuse of disability claims by employees of the Long Island Rail Road, exposed by the New York Times’s Walt Bogdanich three years ago and noted in several items here at the time, has at last eventuated in indictments of eleven defendants, including doctors and “facilitators.” According to prosecutors, the bogus benefit claims could have exceeded $1 billion if paid out to completion. “The Times articles reported that virtually every career employee of the railroad was applying for and receiving disability payments, giving the Long Island Rail Road a disability rate three to four times that of the average railroad.” [NYT, NRO “Corner”]

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Labor and employment law roundup

  • “EEOC showing late summer spike in discrimination suits” [NLJ]
  • In new Lamons Gasket case, NLRB generously protects unions from many secret-ballot decertification elections [Hyman] Some employers rename quickie-elections proposal “ambush elections” [ShopFloor; see also Hannah Bowen, CRC, PDF] “NLRB’s Pro-Big Labor Ruling Trifecta is Bad News for the Economy” [Ivan Osorio, CEI] Did NLRB have legal authority to issue rule requiring employers to post union-rights posters on pain of criminal penalties? [Schaumber/NRO via Ted/PoL]
  • Wage and hour law roundup: Law clerks fail in bid for overtime pay [Above the Law] “U.S. Open Umpires Sue for Overtime” [Fox Rothschild] Lawsuit challenges unpaid Hollywood internships [NYT]
  • Public sector labor reform: Let the lawsuits begin! [Daniel DiSalvo, Public Sector Inc.]
  • “Verizon Settles EEOC Disability Suit Based on No-Fault Attendance Policy” [Workplace Prof]
  • Just can’t win dept.: after white firefighters extract large settlement from city of New Haven over reverse discrimination, Second Circuit rules that black firefighters can sue the city over the same “validated” test [WSJ, Schwartz]
  • Screening job applicants through personality tests: when is it legal? [Hyman]
  • Way to discourage employers from offering sabbaticals: have courts construe them as deferred vacation benefits [Cal Labor] Way to discourage volunteers [Cain, FindLaw]
  • No, rules Judge Preska, the law doesn’t obligate employers to provide work/life balance [Hyman, Greenfield, PoL]
  • Another purportedly disabled firefighter fit enough to run an Ironman event [WITI] “Can you pay me under the table? I would lose my disability” [Coyote]

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Annals of New York public employment: Matter of Seiferheld v. Kelly

An opinion from New York’s highest court last month begins as follows:

Petitioner, a New York City police officer, retired in 2004 and was awarded accident disability benefits. In the following years, the police department received information indicating that petitioner was not disabled; that he had made false representations to the Pension Fund; and that he had ingested cocaine, thus becoming ineligible to return to duty. The City, understandably, claims that it should not have to continue paying him a pension.

Under New York law, however, the City is wrong, the court reluctantly concludes. Meanwhile (via Philip Howard’s Common Good) a New York law forbidding the closure of a unionized facility without a year’s notice has meant that a disused juvenile detention center upstate is being kept going with no clients: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says “We’re paying 30 staff people to baby-sit an empty building,” and calls it “bizarre.” And another state law requires that school districts field buses with capacity to seat every eligible child every day, which means that in districts like Port Washington, L.I., where many eligible children come to school by other means, buses routinely travel half full, at an unneeded cost the Port Washington superintendent estimates at $2 million a year.

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May 4 roundup

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“Collective Bargaining and Social-Worker Abuse”

Last week the New York Times ran a chilling investigative account of what goes on at New York group homes for the developmentally disabled, where employees in hundreds of cases appear to have abused or mistreated residents with impunity. Per the Times:

…in 25 percent of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the state employees were transferred to other homes. The state initiated termination proceedings in 129 of the [399] cases reviewed but succeeded in just 30 of them, in large part because the workers’ union, the Civil Service Employees Association, aggressively resisted firings in almost every case.

Revelations like this should be front and center in the unfolding debate over public employee unionization, but often aren’t. [h/t: James Sherk, NRO “Corner”]

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