FRIDAY UPDATE
Brothers and Sisters,
This week members of your Local 1014 Executive Board met with the Department to work on Manual of Operations language, IPFIRS and payroll issues to administer our negotiated benefit - Compensatory Time Off (CTO).
It took many years to get the County to agree to allow our members to bank hours worked in lieu of overtime pay. Under the law, CTO is treated the same as Overtime (OT) for the purposes of FLSA. We negotiated and earned the ability to bank up to 96 hours of OT as “Time on the Books” to use at a later date.
We have worked countless hours to develop the language for our manuals that remains true to the intent of the MOU language. We are close to completion which includes addressing Volume 2 staffing items and timekeeping issues. We cannot stress enough that words matter to protect our FLSA pay, terms of OT tracking, and assignment to ensure a fair and equitable outcome for our members.
Some highlights in advance of the policy are:
- Comp Time (CT) time will be treated as Benefit Time for filling and use and all requests for CT time will be submitted on Form 38.
- Personnel working OT may elect to bank comp time in lieu of overtime. For a shift, 24 hours of comp time may be banked up to a maximum of 96 hours total at any given time, and the 12 hours of premium pay will be paid. Time and one half will always be the rate we earn OT or CTO and this was key in our negotiations for FLSA purposes.
- When a member burns a CTO Day, the member working cannot bank CTO again on that day. This is important and prevents compounding a CTO day in perpetuity.
- CTO days may only be banked when working in your rank, no work down CTO banked days, and when members promote or retire they will be paid their CTO hour balance, and all hours of CTO will be recorded and treated as hours worked for the purposes of FLSA and FD-7 Recording just as if they and literally they are OT hours.
- CTO days being filled will be treated like benefit days and will be filled with available personnel only, and not garner recall for fill. They will be treated the same as V, SP, and F days. The likely IPFIRS codes will be CT for Comp Time Banked and ST for CTO taken.
On the implementation side, it will remain fairly simple and includes mechanisms to prevent abuse. We will monitor to ensure all members are using the benefit appropriately and that the Department is managing the use fairly. We hope to have a good track record of use by the time we negotiate again and increase the number of days on the books.
We want to thank Deputy Chief William Mc Cloud and Assistant Chief Dennis Breshears for the long hours spent at the Union Hall to get this tedious but important work done so we can begin to enjoy this benefit. The fires have died down and we are aggressively working to handle some follow up work on our manual language. We expect to have this item done before the holidays.
I have asked the Chief to help me to prioritize and finish some critical working and pay items for a Merry Christmas year-end finish. We will have more info on those later but know that CTO is one of those items to help us as we deal with the staffing shortage and year-end wildfires.
REMINDER: All Local 1014 members need to update their contact information with the Union in order to receive our weekly communications and important information including election ballots.
Please call 310-639-1014 with your Employee ID number or Social Security number available to update the following member information: Name, Address, Phone, Cell, Email, Rank, and Station.
Have a great weekend as we prepare for Thanksgiving. Stay safe and take care of each other out there.
