The Washington Post has an interesting story today about how police departments around the country are often forced to rehire police officers who have been fired for misbehavior thanks to union contract rules.

That is crap. There is no such provision in any CBA.

Most of the officers regained their jobs when police chiefs were overruled by arbitrators, typically lawyers hired to review the process. In many cases, the underlying misconduct was undisputed, but arbitrators often concluded that the firings were unjustified because departments had been too harsh, missed deadlines, lacked sufficient evidence or failed to interview witnesses.

That's the reason. Violation of due process.

And just damn, they left out the best one — disparate treatment. The nephew of the captain did the same as you (pretty much no matter what) and he did not get fired. That is disparate treatment and it's a winning argument.

That was in 2009, nearly two years after the sexual abuse. The union appealed Sugg-Edwards firing and five years later, in January 2015, an arbitrator decided the union was right in their contention that the department could not take harsher action than was recommended by the trial board. Sugg-Edwards would have to be reinstated. The police department is now suing in court to prevent Sugg-Edwards from getting his job back.

I do not see any case where they provide the actual reason a reinstatement was ordered. In general, when reinstatement happens as in Sugg-Edwards, the employee get back pay for all the time lost, with interest. If he can establish lost overtime, he might get that too. Maybe lost benefits and seniority. It is like a great big paid vacation.

The CBA will not require a rehire, but it will require adherence to due process for the imposition of disciplinary action. What needs to be done is clearly spelled out. Management clearly violates it all the time with reckless abandon. They will drag it out for years, knowing they will lose. It's not their money.

Don't blame the CBA. Blame the supervisors.

WaPo is slanted but only they and NYSlimes do much original reporting. And if they won't report on something, no one else does either. Well, maybe LATimes now and then.

We're a bit past the era of the big newspaper but WaPo and NYSlimes still have the role they've always played as the two premier newspapers in the country.

I see your points however I thought it worth posting because it was HotAir and WaPo.

The article was worth posting, if just to call attention to the wasted money due to grievance payments. Sometimes a single class-action grievance is worth millions.

Some employees could make an extra $10K a year just by filing grievances for crossing craft. That is where the supervisor assigns a worker from craft X to do work belonging to craft Y. A class Y worker files a grievance and gets paid for the hours at the overtime rate.

The supervisor does it over and over and the studious worker gets paid over and over. The supervisor gets recognition for being efficient. That does not sound right, does it? It costs nothing extra to assign the workers from the wrong craft, not counting the grievance. The payment of grievances is a different line item than the supervisor's operation. On paper, his operation did amazing. Give him a bonus.

Unfortunately, the grieving worker does not keep all of the grievance award. The grievance is submitted via the union. Usually, one or more union officers will tack their name on when submitting the grievance paperwork.

The article was worth posting, if just to call attention to the wasted money due to grievance payments. Sometimes a single class-action grievance is worth millions.

I worked in a union shop once. We had similar situations. But if you made mistakes repeatedly with assigning work to employees that resulted in the company being timeslipped by other employees, you would not be happy in your job. I was also involved peripherally in company discipline cases which were pretty amazing. I could tell some tales about the crap the employees used to pull with the company. And even if you fired them, they had job insurance to pay them full wages for the 3 or 6 or 12 months they were off until the union got their job back. Some of those cases were ridiculous.

Most people haven't worked a hardcore union job so they don't realize how dumb these union shop rules are.

I worked in a union shop once.

My observations are of unionized government work. It is different because neither the employees nor management pays the bills or cares about profits and losses. The potential for what can be done, with a little ingenuity, is mind boggling.

In a different vein, spending and accounting in the military can be a joy as well. At the end of every quarter, there is a spending spree just to make sure you "obligate" the entire allowance to ensure the allowance is not cut the next year. For the comptroller, this presents a challenge. If you have to pay out a penny more than authorized, it is a reportable violation and very bad for the comptroller. Contracts usually may be adjusted by a specified amount after performance, if justified. Say a $1K contract obligation may result in a legitimate $1.1K claim and payment. How to obligate 99+% of allowance and not incur a violation? Near FY end, make up completely bogus contracts for work to be performed at a later date. Let them sit in the system until the end of the next quarter. Then cancel the bogus contracts. And now you have the money from the billable FY to cover any added costs of contract adjustments.

My observations are of unionized government work. It is different because neither the employees nor management pays the bills or cares about profits and losses.

In my experience, it's much the same in the private sector. A union shop is a union shop. Seniority (or tenure in academia) makes it too hard to fire anyone. And if you make mistakes, only the customer pays through increased rates to keep the company solvent and profitable.

But I do see your point. The moral hazard involved with public sector unions is much higher and with far less accountability.

Seniority (or tenure in academia) makes it too hard to fire anyone.

Public employees who are hard to fire do yield one benefit. When corrupt management messes with such employees, some become dedicated whistleblowers, reporting the crap management does. What the worker bees do is but a trifle compared to management. If they can just fire employees at will, they can pretty much silence them.

Anyway, they can do it already but government gets worse and worse anyway.