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North Texas Association of Public Employees
Steel Workers Local 9479
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Performance
Appraisal Terminations?
This
year employees who receive less than a fully successful on their
performance grading will automatically have a performance improvement
plan (PIP) written up for them. This
PIP will give the underrated employees eight to twelve weeks to improve
their performance or face immediate termination.
The same people who gave the less than successful rating will now
get to decide if that employee has improved enough to keep their job. This
could be a bit of a problem.
While
there are admittedly employees who need to improve their performance,
there are also a lot of employees who are going to get a bad rating just
so someone else in their department can get a really great one. Is it
fair to put someone’s job in jeopardy just so your department can make
the bell curve? No. But fair or not this is what is going to happen.
That
our current performance reviews are subjective is not news to anyone.
That they more often than not are late, incorrectly done, and provide
little coaching or follow up, is not news either. What is news is that
two weeks before final reviews were to begin; this very serious
procedure change was sprung on the supervisors and managers who score
them.
This
year is the one year that civilian employees cannot afford to be
complacent about their review score. Bad scores need to be fought every
step. Even if the bad score is not overturned on appeal, affected
employees need to make sure that any Performance Improvement Plan has
clear, achievable improvements
and measurable
goals. We all know the performance plans are designed to be vague and
subjective, but having a vague or subjective PIP would virtually
guarantee a job loss.
Should
any association member get a score that is below fully successful they
need to immediately contact our employee counselors. If you do not
receive an answer within an hour; you need to contact them again.
Wasting time could cost you your job! Please contact Scott or Dan
at (214) 760-7422 Voice, (214)
760-7423 Fax or email them at Comments@ntape.com
Tell
the Truth or be Challenged
Steelworker
President Ernesto Pena spoke to council during their
September 27th meeting. He
had originally intended to speak on another topic, but became angry when
City Manager Mary Suhm again
made statements that were untrue, telling the council that this will be
the second year
that we have not had a health benefit cost increase.
During
his speech, Ernesto corrected Ms. Suhm and reminded council that health
benefit rates increased last year, 35 to 65 percent for those employees
who had the City’s HMO plan. When
council started to rumble about this being true, Ms. Suhm back pedaled
and said that she meant her statement was about the employees who were
under the PPO plan.
It
is not like Ms. Suhm has not been asked to refrain from making this
incorrect
blanket statement before.
She and numerous high ranking HR reps have been reproached many times
for continuing to misrepresent the cost and impact of the city’s
health benefit programs to the council, the employees and the public.
When
challenged by the Steelworkers Ms Suhm and other H.R. reps have again
and again reluctantly admitted that their statements did not apply to all employees. They have
tried to justify this attempt to pass on this untruth as a
misunderstanding or a misstatement. Once, possibly twice can be a
mistake, any more than that is a deliberate attempt to perpetuate a lie.
Granted lies often make better sound bites, but the truth
is easier to defend.
Former
Council Member Larry Duncan Encourages Organization
Larry
Duncan, a current Dallas County School Board member visited us this
month during our regular membership meeting. Mr. Duncan discussed how
the organization of the Dallas County School bus drivers was helping
them. He also encouraged all
Dallas
City
employees to get
serious about organizing so they can really have a voice. He states that
only by sticking together can we achieve the power to change city
policy.
Employees'
Retirement Election
Due
to recent charter changes, Employee Retirement Fund Trustee John Jenkins
is again up for re-election. His current term will expire on
December 31, 2006
. As you know,
Mr. Jenkins is not only the newest trustee we have but also the
youngest. As those of you who heard him speak at the last election
forums know, he also has a lot of ideas for the future improvement of
the fund.
John
Jenkins works for the Park & Recreation Department as a District
Manager. He has eleven years of pension service.
He is running against Les Studdard of the
Office of Cultural Affairs, James Floyd Harris of Courts and Detention
Services, and Egbert Hood of the Office of Financial Services.
After
you receive your information packet in the mail, you will be able to
vote by phone. Voting will be open from
October 24, 2006
thru
November 9, 2006
Grievance Deals? Or are they?
Employees
who have filed grievances need to be alert for last minute meetings or
deals. You should not agree to drop a grievance without alerting your
grievance rep and getting the ‘deal’ in writing.
Some
honorable managers will finally see the problem and try to fix it, but
unfortunately telling the difference between them and the managers who
are trying to find a way to delay and derail your grievance is sometimes
difficult. Why would they do this?
1. They need time to scrounge up documentation or witnesses
that they did not properly have on hand at the time of the reprimand.
2. They want to stall, hoping that you will drop the thing or
miss a deadline by assuming that they will honor their word. Don’t.
Get it in writing.
3. You have them dead to rights and they need more time to
try to think of a way to weasel out of the mess they created.
4. Last minute meetings, they just want to talk to you for a
few minutes. They are often looking for something they can twist. Ask if
this has anything to do with your grievance. If it does, tell them you
need more advanced notice of the meeting so you can have your
Association Rep present before you discuss anything. Scott and Dan will
thank you. ;D
Blue
Cross HMO is being Replaced
According
to Lonzie Green, H.R. Benefit Manager, Blue Cross was going to
substantially raise their rates again this year. Which would have meant
a second year of substantial cost increases since the city would have
passed the entire increase on to the city employees who have the HMO
plan.
The
city intends to replace the HMO plan with an entirely city funded
Exclusive Provider Organization (EPO) plan.
On paper the plan is similar to our previous HMO. Employees will
not need to choose a primary care physician and no referrals will be
required to see a specialist.
The
plan proposal will use the same providers as the city’s PPO plan, and
will allow access to the UHC national network for easier coverage when
traveling. A side by side comparison of the EPO and the previous HMO
plan showed no real differences. When the comparison was looked over by
someone who deals with health issues on a daily basis, they found no
problems with the stated coverage transfer. They did however warn me
that the devil is in the details and they would be interested to see how
the final plan will be spelled out in the master agreement.
The
EPO this year is basically an experiment. While the city expects to
achieve economies due to all the benefits being under one company, there
is still some question of exactly how much this will ultimately cost the
city. Unlike a normal HMO where the city and the employees pay a fixed
rate and the risk of excess charges is entirely assumed by the HMO
Company, the EPO will open the city up to additional charges over the
amounts paid by the premiums. How
much can be saved vs how much more it might cost the city before the
year is over is impossible to know. Mr. Green states that to minimize
the risk, the city has purchased a Stop-Loss policy incase the number
gets too high. No word on what will happen next year for the HMO/EPO
group should this occur.
Sadly
there is still no plan to look at the HMO (EPO) rates being paid by
employees with single coverage vs employees and dependents. Mr. Green
stated that they had considered addressing it this year, but they need
to look at all the rates, not just the HMO (EPO) rates, so any decisions
were postponed until next year. Bummer that. – M.R. Frey
Departmental
Performance Appraisal Evaluation Report
As
was requested by the Steelworkers this spring, the City Manager Mary
Suhm had a Performance Appraisal Evaluation done to see how well the
various City Departments were doing in following the rules for the
Performance Appraisals. The
Steelworkers were invited to look and comment on the rough draft being
prepared.
One
major disappointment was that this report puts a lot of emphasis on the
results of a badly flawed HR survey. The fact that this survey had major
problems was not news to HR Director David Ethridge.
One
of the problems with the survey referenced was that is was buried by
certain departments. The worse problem however was that other
departments had their lower level supervisors hand out surveys to their
direct reports and then gathered them back up again. How this was
supposed to elicit an untainted result of how well their supervisor did
their performance appraisal is the big question.
But apparently not as far as HR was concerned since they still
used the data.
The
draft report had several recommendations including one that would require
every employee’s review to be completed (ideally with input
from the employees) and then electronically transmitted to HR. at the
beginning of the rating period. HR would then track that every employees
review plan was done on time. This would eliminate employees being
graded on a plan that they did not see until it was time to sign it at
the end of the rating period.
It
was recommended that supervisors would be required to do mid year
(April) reviews to determine each employees progress. There was no
mention of whether these would also be submitted to HR to insure
compliance.
Other
recommendations included one to establish departmental committees to
review all high and low ratings. This would be an improvement over the
current procedure that most departments use where a single auditor
reviews the high and low ratings for appropriateness.
The
best recommendation was that HR shall conduct an analysis of
supervisor’s compliance with the review system with recommended
discipline for supervisor non-compliance.
The
Steelworkers pointed out that there is no recommendation for outside
review of disputed appraisals. This is troubling due to recent
training sessions where supervisors were told that only two appeals are
possible. Also to keep the level of the appeals as low as possible, the
managers are not supposed to see the finished reviews. This is to keep
them untainted and available in the appeal process. How untainted they
will be is of course going to be really open for argument.
This
procedure would not provide much protection to individual employees who
have a supervisor problem or are in a troubled department. We pointed
out that the appeals need to be able to get out of the department if the
city wants to make real progress towards doing them correctly and having
them be perceived as fair.
During
our conversation, Ms. Suhm did mention the possibility of having a
‘Last Resort’ appeal panel created somehow. So we pointed out that
with the above restriction being put into place, only the very highest
of employees would ever reach it. That would be unfair to the lower
ranked employees.
Ms.
Suhm would favor the “Last Resort’ panel over having departments
swap final appeals. She feels that there could be problems if an
employee had previously worked for and had a bad experience with the
swapped department. The Steelworkers disagreed with her on this,
pointing out that such problems would be relatively rare and easily
fixed.
The
main difficulty with a ‘Last Resort’ appeal panel would be who would
run it. Ms. Suhm speculated that it could be assigned to a special group
in the HR department. The Steelworker reminded her that placing a
‘Last Resort’ panel with the department that assists the departments
with their disciplinary actions would do absolutely nothing to assure
the employees that they would receive a fair appeal. We
suggested possibly making the panel part of the Civil Service group.
While employees may not always like what they hear from Civil Service,
they are perceived as being more independent of the departments than any
other group in the city.
It
will be interesting to see what suggestions survive and make it into the
final recommendations.
Snipletts!
Employee
Surveys - As a side question to Ms. Suhm we inquired if it would be asking too much
to have a fair and unbiased employee appraisal survey done? This 2005
survey was tainted by many of them being handed out and collected by the
very supervisor’s whose actions were being checked and also by being
buried by some divisions. The 2004 survey had answers that were all HR
ra-ra slanted and would not allowed you to continue the survey without
picking an answer even if you disagreed with all of the choices
offered.
We
asked if it would be possible to have an independent employee
committee over look the survey language and change the distribution
methods causing some of these problems before
the survey went out.
Granted HR might not like the results it got, but maybe they would get a
real picture of what employees thought and results that were not
tainted.
Grapevine
Ahead of the Curve?
- The City of
Grapevine
recently had a study
done that pointed out both how expensive it was for the city to replace
experienced employees and how fluid the
Dallas
job market was.
Apparently replacement costs for even a
nonprofessional position can total about $12,000, higher level employees
can cost as much as 150 percent of their annual salary. Compare that
with the average
Dallas
merit increase
of $600 to $1,000. Granted,
Dallas
currently has an
advantage that with so many employees close to retirement, none are
going to move to another company... However in the next few years much
of that advantage will swing the other way as we have more and more
employees who are not vested, or are so far from retirement that they
see no problem with jumping to another company.
Grapevine
is now shooting for increasing the salaries of half of their workers to
salaries that are closer to the middle range of the surrounding
communities.
Sadly,
the last report
Dallas
did congratulated
itself that we were above local salary minimums on many of our jobs. So,
still some work to do there.
Numbers
Disputed
- Prior to her Health Benefit Cost misstatements to council last month, Ms.
Suhm tried to dispute earlier statements by the Steelworkers that the
2005 HMO increases impacted almost 25% of the city employees. Which is
pretty strange since that number came from her HR department. Ms.
Suhm apparent rationale for disputing this is that the city no longer
has 25% of its employees enrolled in the HMO plan.
Well
no duh. The city use to have almost 25% of its employees in the plan in
2004. The HMO rate increase for 2005 was between 35 to 65 percent, so a
number of them dropped out of the HMO plan and took the lesser insurance
PPO plan. Newsflash! Just
because the number of people signing up for the HMO plan in 2005
decreased, that does not change the fact that almost 25% of the
employees were affected by the increase in costs. The employees who
could no longer afford the HMO were still impacted, so the number
impacted did not change and is not open to dispute.
Everyone’s a Primary Drivers?
– The Water Department Southside Waste treatment plant came up with a
novel idea recently.They sent out a memo out informing all their
employees (except for a few clerks) that they were going to be
re-classified as Primary Drivers.
There
is some disagreement as to the why. Some claim it was to make all the
operators subject to mandatory random drug testing with out a supervisor
actually having to claim reasonable cause.... others claim it was
because someone made a mistake interpreting the city rules and decided
that there was no difference between the operation of wastewater
machinery and motor vehicle machinery. (??!!??)
But what ever the real reason, the attempted switch was wrong,
and would have put the older operators at risk of losing their jobs due
to not being able to pass a ‘Driver Physical’.
A
quick grievance with HR and a Freedom of information request to the City
Secretary by one of our Steelworker members, along with a few words in
the ear of the new water department manager Jody Puckett managed to
derail the entire thing in very short order. This instance, illustrates
perfectly how taking prompt action can keep an ill-considered decision
from becoming bad policy.
The Time to Join is Now!
Don’t
forget about the 30 day waiting period on certain services for new
members. We don’t want anyone to miss out on assistance should they
need it. The time to join is now, so you will already be a member before
any problem that you need help with occurs.
Council
Meeting Audio Available
Did
you know that you can download city council meetings? Some interesting
stuff in there. Take a listen. http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/cso/audio.shtm
End
of year raffle Remember at the last meeting of the year you get one
raffle chance for every meeting or work session you sign in for.
Make six meetings, get six chances. So congratulations to the
members who were present at the December meeting when their names were
drawn for the gift certificates from Target, Best Buy and Chili’s.
