After meeting with James Hanley, commissioner of the city’s Office of Labor Relations, last month, Local 237 President Carl Haynes said he is “hopeful that the agency will now be more judicious in its handling of members’ line-of-duty injury cases and other grievances.”

Haynes, who described the February meeting with Hanley as being “cordial,” said sometimes policies are established without an understanding of the impact they would have on people’s lives. “I think Commissioner Hanley understands now the hardship caused by his agency’s policy of denying city workers assault or line-of-duty injury pay, especially when the case is clear-cut.” Hanley, Haynes said, has promised to review some of the cases pending for arbitration.

“When you are barely earning enough to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck, everything falls apart when that paycheck stops because you cannot go to work,” Haynes added. “It’s demoralizing for school safety agents, hospital police officers and others who are frequently injured in the line of duty to be told they cannot get extended sick pay while they are recovering and unable to work.”

Local 237’s Grievance Coordinator Deborah Singer, who handles the union’s Step 3 cases — along with Joel Sosinsky, special assistant to the president, and Citywide Director Gregory Floyd — met with representatives of OLR recently to present some 50 line-of-duty cases the union identified as paramount and several Step 3 grievance cases for review.

“The union is not asking for anything members are not entitled to in their contract,” Floyd stated. “The contract language is clear about what constitutes assault and line-of-duty injury.”

“If the playing field was level and OLR was playing fair, the union should be winning many of these cases by Step 3,” Singer said. “These cases are slam dunks for us. They are so clear-cut there’s nothing to argue about. We have all the evidence and witnesses on our side to win the case for extended sick pay.”

Haynes said OLR’s policy of denial was put into place during the Giuliani administration to frustrate and stall the grievance process, and to avoid paying out money to workers until they absolutely had to. Singer said the union wins most of the line-of-duty cases in arbitration and members are awarded back pay from the time of the injury. Going to arbitration, however, is a time-consuming and expensive process. Just getting an arbitration hearing alone can take up to nine months.

“It is unconscionable and heartless that the city would willingly leave its injured workers out in the cold without any income to pay rent and other basic necessities for their families,” Haynes said. The city’s strategy in stalling the process, he added, is that the union would find another way to resolve the case or allow it to linger and die rather than spend all that money to pursue it to arbitration.

“Sure arbitration is expensive,” Haynes said. “A huge proportion of the union’s income is spent on resolving grievances and line-of-duty injury cases. But Local 237 is committed to its members, and we will devote the resources necessary to pursue all line-of-duty cases and grievances to arbitration regardless of cost.”