Provisionals' Sad Reminder

A half-dozen provisional employees in the Administration for Children's Services are about to lose their jobs, casualties of the city's budget-cutting efforts.

This is part of the routine trimming of agencies now going on, notwithstanding the recent healthbenefits deal that will keep tenured civil servants in their jobs at least through Oct. 1 while municipal unions seek to find some other way to protect them further into the future.

Provisionals were left exposed by the deal, and normally there would be nothing to raise eyebrows about their departure—under state law, they are prohibited from staying in positions for more than nine months provided there is a valid civil service list in place from which to fill the positions.

In the case of these six employees, however, they have all been working for at least 20 years. That means when they were first hired, Ed Koch was Mayor and their employer was the Department of Social Services. They have performed their work, most recently as House Parents, under three other Mayors and during the transition that led to ACS being created as a separate agency.

One of the employees, Geraldine Knight, told this newspaper's David Sims that she had failed to get permanent status in her job because, while she passed the written portion of the civil service exam, she failed the typing test. But typing, she noted, is not one of her basic job duties.

It's an unreasonable basis on which to exclude someone from the ranks of tenured civil servants, which now conveniently makes her and her colleagues vulnerable to layoffs without any recourse and without much protest from their union. But it's also a harsh reminder to provisionals, particularly those who have lasted in their jobs long beyond the nine-month maximum prescribed under law, that no matter how long they have worked in a position and how capable they become, they can be discharged at any time—sometimes for more-dubious reasons than a budget crunch.