Working (and working) for a living; Some state employees double, triple salaries with overtime pay
By JAMES M. ODATO
The Times Union
Overtime, sick leave lucrative for some COs
ALBANY, N.Y. — Colleen L. Sabin averages 87 hours a week at her job as a development aide, placing her in the top 10 of overtime workers on the state payroll.
Her overtime checks from working 2,455 extra hours for Sunmount Developmental Center brought her total pay last year to $110,841, nearly triple her $38,500 salary.
According to a Times Union review of 375,000 state and public authority salaries, a third get overtime. Sabin is among hundreds of state employees working excessive hours. And there were nine other state employees with more overtime than she had, including another development aide topping 3,000 hours of overtime. They’re among more than 121,000 state agency employees who collected more than $459 million in overtime last year, the state records show.
Key reasons, union officials say, are staffing shortages and, in many cases, mandatory overtime.
“It becomes a little bit counterproductive,” said Steve Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association. “It’s a cause for concern because the staff is literally burned out.”
Sabin, 51, assists eight mentally disabled people in a group home near her Tupper Lake residence, cooking, cleaning and doing other chores. Overtime boosted her pay almost $69,000 in 2007.
“They put up a list and you put your name down if you want to work it; I usually do,” Sabin said dryly after her typical short night of sleep.
She is among dozens of people in state service working more than 2,000 hours of overtime annually. There are hundreds of others working more than 1,000 hours a year in overtime.
Leading the list was Cynthia McAdams, a development aide at Western New York Disabilities and Development Services. She put in 3,110 overtime hours, amounting to 100-hour work weeks on average, according to records from the Office of State Comptroller. Her overtime checks totaled more than $87,000. Total pay: $126,459.
Most of the overtime gets logged by direct-care workers like Sabin and McAdams whose work places are open around-the-clock. Likewise, millions of hours are going to others working in prisons, including people guarding extremely troubled youths for the Office of Children & Family Services.
Indeed, hundreds of state workers, especially relatively low wage employees who guard violent, mentally disabled or psychologically ill people, have work weeks that provide for minimal time for rest but expanded annual incomes. Officials say the child protective services’ overtime is breaking records.
Indeed, workers in health care, psychiatric care and mental health care received the biggest overtime paychecks.
State officials claim they’ve been recruiting, beefing up the ranks where they can and studying the issue, but add their hands are tied in many cases because of civil service rules and union contracts. They emphasize that most overtime is voluntary and, under collective bargaining agreements, handed out on a seniority basis. The forced overtime is assigned to the most junior members of the work force.
Gov. David Paterson’s aides say that because of high turnover rates in some fields and required staffing ratios at facilities that must be open 24 hours a day, someone must take over extra shifts. The volunteers for overtime often are people earning higher pay in their salary grades for their organizations. Some are bulking up their annual incomes for bigger pensions at retirement.
Some workers appear to be at work most of their waking hours. For instance Kuei Mei Lin, a nurse at Rochester Psychiatric Center made $113,282 beyond her salary of $61,757 last year for working 2,465 hours of overtime.
Robert B. Henry, a treatment assistant, made $103,434 after working 2,682 hours of overtime at Mid Hudson Psychiatric Center. In Albany, Mary Riley, a therapy assistant at Capital District Psychiatric Center took in $57,993 on top of her $38,775 salary after logging 2,043.75 of overtime.
“You never want to be the patient wondering if they’re on their eighth hour or their sixteenth hour in facilities like the prisons and the psych centers,” said Darcy Wells, a spokeswoman for the Public Employees Federation.
Officials at PEF, and other unions, have mixed feelings about overtime: They want members to have a chance to add to their incomes, but they also want increased staffing to avoid unwanted overtime.
The Office of Mental Health is looking into the overtime issue.
“Unless it is determined that an individual is not fit for duty, the negotiated agreements provide no way that management can limit the number of hours an individual works,” said Jill Daniels, a spokeswoman.
Overtime is available every day in the state prisons, union officials say. As a result, many correction officers get lots of overtime - none more than Jerry Nellis, of Greene Correctional Facility, who sometimes also takes duty at Albany Medical Center watching inmate patients. He logged 1,965.5 hours of overtime last year for an additional $87,594 in pay. He didn’t want to talk about his 78-hour weeks.
Fellow Greene officer Donald Naylor, who worked 1,712 hours of overtime for $77,114 in extra pay, said most of the extra time is voluntary, but some of it is forced.
Naylor, 51, of Catskill, said he’s retiring in about 10 months and doesn’t mind the overtime because it adds to his average annual pay for pension calculations. “Is it fatiguing? To me it’s fatiguing when you don’t work overtime,” he said. “Once you get in a groove, it’s harder to work overtime once in a while rather than regularly.”
“It’s volunteer,” John Telinsky, a spokesman for the New York State Correction Officers & Police Benevolent Association said. “But if he doesn’t put his name in the book, they’ll force somebody with the least seniority.”
The Department of Corrections hasn’t hired to the levels of its authorization and overtime is a reflection of the situation, he said. The department disputes the assertion.
“We are trying to combat the problem,” said Erik Kriss, a corrections spokesman. He said nurse recruitment is ongoing but shortages are severe. Staff overtime is actually down by more than 16 percent - 120,000 hours - the past four months, he said.
Overtime for corrections staff is driven by workers’ compensation, personal, military and sick leaves as well as training and union absences. The department is at its authorization level, Kriss said, with 19,664 officers. It would like to add to its 1,833 health workers.
Overtime costs are rising as the hours are cut. The department’s 2006-07 budget appropriated $50.3 million for overtime for the supervision of inmates, or 1,372,496 hours. The 2007-08 budget appropriated $58.9 million for 1,337,954 hours.
At facilities run by Child & Family Services for young prisoners, dozens of people are working overtime. “People call in sick, people are out on disability,” said Edward Borges, a spokesman. The office hit a record 2.78 million hours of overtime last year and is on pace to exceed it this year.
Officials with the Office of Mental Health and the Office of Mental Retardation and Disabilities Development said they are aware of the heavy overtime being worked by individuals. Supervisors are asked to make sure workers are up to the extra load. They could not speculate on how Paterson’s plan to restrict hiring and cut operations by 7 percent will impact overtime.
“OMRDD and Gov. Paterson would not sacrifice the health and safety of the individuals in our care - or that of the direct-care workers,” said Nicole Weinstein, a spokeswoman for the agency. “That being said, we simply don’t know as of yet the rules as to exceptions to the freeze.”
Overtime was one of the many major work force issues he tried to address during his time with Paterson and Gov. Eliot Spitzer, said Paul Francis, the former director of operations who oversaw all the agencies. “Any hiring freeze has to take into account that in some cases increasing labor count will reduce labor costs,” he said. “In some cases, it would save the state money and provide better services.”
Copyright 2008 The Hearst Corporation