Seek to Transform City's Job System;

Want Fewer Provisionals
Seek to Transform City's Job System


The city's testing agency has devised a five-year plan to drastically reduce provisional employees with permanent workers that includes administering more tests, merging titles, and creating promotion exams that could be used for several positions.

MARTHA HIRST: Have to 'step up testing.' The changes are the Bloomberg administration's reaction to a decision in May that a group of 12 long-term provisional employees in the Long Island town of Long Beach were not entitled to a disciplinary hearing before being fired and replaced with eligibles from a civil-service roster.

CSEA Claim Rebuffed

The Civil Service Employees' Association filed a grievance on behalf of those workers, arguing that under the terms of its contract the employees should be deemed tenured after one year of service and therefore entitled to be rehired to another position.

The Court of Appeals, however, ruled that the Civil Service Law clearly sets a nine-month time limitation on provisional appointments.

"The law makes crystal clear that we have to start moving towards the standard," said Martha Hirst, the Commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, during an Aug. 6 phone interview.

JOSEPH P. ADDABBO Jr.: Favors proposal.

Plan More Exams

DCAS plans to hire additional test-writers to help draft new exams for the city's yearly test schedule next year, Ms. Hirst added. Traditionally, DCAS administers slightly more than 100 exams each year.

"Our challenge at DCAS is that we have to give more exams going forward," she continued. "We are going to have to step it up in a very profound way."

The plan marks the first time in years that the city will work towards making serious inroads to reduce its temporary employees. But some union officials are worried that the city may look to lay off provisional employees or transfer them to lower titles without replacing them with eligibles from lists.

Protections Invalidated

The Court of Appeals decision also invalidated protections that several large city and state unions have negotiated for their provisional members. Under District Council 37's collective-bargaining agreement, provisionals serving for two or more years were previously entitled to a hearing before being disciplined or fired, similar to their tenured colleagues.

ROBERT CROGHAN: Mix merit and protection. The state's highest court, however, ruled that those union-negotiated agreements can't supersede the law. "A provisional employee has never met and proven that they meet the qualifications to get that protection based on the State of New York laws," said Corey Klein, who handled the case for the city of Long Beach. "This decision doesn't say whether someone is qualified or not - the state has created a system that says in order to get this protection you have to pass a test."

Ms. Hirst added, "It also has pretty strong language that nine months is nine months."

As a result of the ruling, the State Legislature has passed a bill to amend the Civil Service Law to require jurisdictions to come up with a systematic way to replace provisionals with permanent employees.

30,000 Provisionals

DC 37 officials believe the legislation, which is being supported by DCAS, will restore protections to long-term provisional workers. The union has also long urged DCAS to administer more civil-service exams.

There are close to 30,000 provisionals currently employed by the city, according to DCAS. Creating a system to give all those workers an opportunity to gain permanent status would be a complicated process, as many of those provisionals work in high-turnover titles and some are employed in specialized fields. The largest single category of provisionals consists of workers in clerical titles, reflecting high turnover in such jobs.

City agencies are allowed to hire or promote workers provisionally when they face an immediate need and a list is not available. Provisionals are supposed to be made permanent Competitive-Class employees or be replaced within nine months by candidates drawn from lists, but that rule is often ignored.

Ms. Hirst said that she recently met with many of the city's other commissioners to explain the court decision and to encourage them to use current eligible rosters. "The key thing for agencies is that they have to hire off of lists," she remarked.

Look to Merge Titles

She noted that DCAS also specifically scheduled an exam leading to Secretary and other clerical positions this year "because they have numbers of provisionals serving in those titles."

DCAS's main priority, she added, has always been to administer public-safety exams such as Police Officer, Correction Officer, Firefighter, and Sanitation Worker.

As part of the new plan, DCAS is also looking into merging titles and creating promotion tests that include sections that apply to several titles.

Transport Workers Union Local 100, however, has objected to the city's prior move to combine several New York City Transit titles, asserting that it reduced its members' promotion opportunities.

State Decreased Rolls

Many of DCAS's proposals are similar to changes that former state Civil Service Commissioner George C. Sinnott enacted to decrease the state's provisional rolls.

Over the past decade, the state has cut the number of civil service titles from 7,000 to 3,800, said department spokesman David Ernst. "And then the second thing is there's been an effort to continue to give exams on an ongoing basis," he added.

Those moves have been effective. In April 1994, there were 5,979 provisionals, or 3.8 percent of the state's 155,000-person work force. By contrast, as of this July the state employed 1,949 provisionals, or 1.4 percent of its complete personnel.

"So it's of manageable proportions at this point," Mr. Ernst remarked. "You are always going to have a certain number of provisionals because there is always going to be some turnover, but we've been successful in keeping it down relatively low."

'Increase Efficiency'

DCAS's plan to combine promotion tests, however, would be different than the state's promotion battery exam, which leads to countless different titles. That system has been attacked by minority advocacy groups, which contend the test is too broad and leads to discriminatory hiring practices.

The city's testing plan includes an effort to identify abilities shared by different job titles and design test modules of exams that can be shared among those specific positions, said DCAS spokesman Mark Daly.

"DCAS still envisions offering separate tests, in some fashion, for each job title," he added. "Our aim is to increase efficiency so we can develop those tests more quickly."

The department will avoid creating new tests that share identical sets of questions and answers, he added.

On-Line Applications

DCAS is also working on using technology to streamline the testing and hiring process. The department has started to launch its on-line job application system, which allows individuals seeking specific jobs to apply and pay filing fees via the agency's Web site.

That DCAS program, which has been in the works for several years, will also eventually automatically grade evaluations based on education and experience, Mr. Daly said.

City Councilman Joseph P. Addabbo Jr. said he supports DCAS's plan to administer more tests and to take proactive steps to help reduce the number of provisionals. "I'm big on enforcement," he said during an Aug. 9 phone interview. "So hopefully DCAS can work with other city agencies to ensure that more of them are using lists."

The costs for administering more exams are "nominal" and will in the long run "be outweighed by the benefits," he said.

Hirings Increased

In October 2004, he introduced legislation that was signed into law by Mayor Bloomberg requiring DCAS to each year detail the number of eligible lists established, exams held, and appointments and promotions.

This year's report released in July revealed that while the number of civil service lists established has increased, the overall figures of provisional hirings and promotions swelled by 47 percent - to 10,004 - in 2006.

DCAS noted that increase occurred during a time period when the agency established 46 more lists than in 2005. In all, the city established 229 rosters in 2006.

Organization of Staff Analysts Chairman Robert J. Croghan said, however, that he was upset that DCAS never discussed the proposed changes with him before he discovered one of his provisional members had been transferred back to her lower civil service title.

'Should've Told Us'

"We are furious that this action would be going forward without contacting the unions that are involved," he said.

The OSA, he added, wants its members to become permanent employees. But the union is concerned that the city plans to get rid of provisionals without replacing them with eligibles from civil service lists.

"While we all want the civil service to become more concrete and real than it has been, we don't want to throw the City of New York into chaos either," he said. "We want our people to be permanent, and we will go to great lengths to make them permanent."

The legal issue surfaced in March 2004, after the State Civil Service Commission issued a report which admonished Long Beach for its poor control over provisional appointments. The report noted that a number of Competitive-Class positions had been improperly filled with and retained by provisional employees.

Long-Term Workers Fired

In response, that city appointed a new Civil Service Commission that ordered the city to address the issue. The city then met with the provisional employees to discuss their employment status. After those conferences, the city determined that the continued employment of certain provisionals violated applicable civil service laws and regulations and fired them.

One of those employees, Maria Almonte, had worked for 15 years as a Bus Dispatcher even though she failed the test for that position.

The CSEA filed a grievance on behalf of those workers, arguing that under the terms of its contract the employees should be deemed tenured after one year of service and therefore entitled to be rehired to another position.

The Court of Appeals, however, ruled that contract stipulation contradicted state law. "The terms of the CBA that afford tenure rights to provisional employees after one year of service are contrary to statute and decisional law and therefore any relief pursuant to those terms may not be granted by an arbitrator," Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. wrote in the majority opinion.