Human Wrongs Commission

When an agency is called the Human Rights Commission, there is a tendency to believe that it will try to behave in a, uh, human fashion. Two employees of the city HRC discovered that was not the case in incidents that should stand as embarrassments to the Bloomberg administration.

One of the workers, Paula Sanders, three years ago broke her toe and was told by doctors that she needed to stay off her feet for several weeks to allow it to heal. Ms. Sanders, who normally handled a mix of field duties and administrative work, asked supervisors whether she could be assigned strictly to office chores while she recovered.

Amazingly, her request was denied, forcing her to use up leave time while remaining at home, even though, as an arbitrator who recently ruled in her favor noted, no evidence surfaced that she could not have carried out duties from the office during her recuperation.

That's a bad-enough example of management inflexibility, but a worse case was decided three weeks ago involving the agency denying an employee the right to take a sick day so he could bring his mother to the hospital for cancer treatment.

The employee, Miguel Ramirez, requested the day off a week in advance, and a supervisor approved it. Astonishingly, he was subsequently notified he would lose a day's pay, despite having provided medical proof of the reason for his absence, because he had not gotten the sick leave approved by his immediate supervisor.

In ruling in Mr. Ramirez's favor, arbitrator Al Viani stated that "sick leave is an earned right under the provisions of the Citywide Agreement. It is not a gift that is within the unfettered discretion of an agency head to approve or deny."

Beyond violating Mr. Ramirez's rights as an employee, the supervisor who penalized him showed unconscionable stupidity, and an obliviousness to how bad this action looks from a public-relations standpoint.

HRC officials should be taking steps—and perhaps a week or two without pay for both the supervisor who sought to dock Mr. Ramirez and the geniuses who thought this case was worth defending in arbitration should be part of it—to make sure no further incidents like this occur. They make the agency's name seem like a misnomer.