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Member Services
DC 37 Laid-off Member Services
Safety
net for laid-off members
Layoff procedures: Know your rights
Competitive
Class Employees Layoff
procedures for permanent civil servants are governed by the Civil Service Law.
-
Civil Service
Law requires that all provisionals in a layoff title must be terminated prior
to any permanent incumbent being laid off. -
Layoffs
of competitive class employees in the same title must take place in the following
order: provisionals, probationers, permanents. -
Provisional
(pure and step-up) and temporary employees can be terminated without regard to
seniority. Provisionals who have two or more years of service do not have greater
rights to remain employed than those who have less than two years of service.
Step-up provisionals have no greater rights to remain employed than pure provisionals;
however they can return to their permanent title. -
Permanent
per-diems have the same Civil Service Law protections as permanent (per-annum)
civil servants. Security
-
Civil service seniority is the governing
factor in the layoff of permanent and probationary employees. -
Although seniority is based on total
continuous service, it is applied within each layoff unit, for each title for
which layoffs are contemplated. For example, assuming there are no provisional
Accountants anywhere in the City, one agency can lay off permanent Accountants
with 10 years of service, even though another agency has permanent Accountants
with 2 years of service. -
Regardless
of seniority, probationary competitive class employees in each layoff unit are
laid off before any permanent employees. -
Seniority
is based upon the first date of permanent service in the classified service (competitive,
non-competitive, exempt, labor-class), in which probation has been completed,
followed by continuous service. -
Civil
Service Law allows for additional seniority for eligible veterans, disabled veterans,
and spouses of disabled veterans. Persons who are blind receive absolute preference
in retention. -
Seniority
date ties are broken in the following ways: those employees hired from a civil
service list with an earlier established date are given priority over those hired
from a later established list. Within each list, employees are ranked in order
of their list number. Special
Transfer Lists -
In
lieu of layoff, permanent/probationary employees are placed on a Special Transfer
List whenever provisional employees are serving elsewhere in the City in the same
or similar titles or where vacancies exist in such titles. -
Appointments from Special Transfer Lists
must be made in number order. The one-in-three rule does not apply.
Employees must be transferred at their current salary. -
If
the number of provisionals is insufficient to exhaust the entire Special Transfer
List, then DCAS may make such list appropriate to a different title where there
are provisionals serving. -
Employees
whose names are certified from Special Transfer Lists and who decline a job offer
will instead be bumped down to a lower title, if applicable (employee must have
served in such lower title, and passed probation, and must have greater seniority
than the employee in the lower title who is to be displaced), or laid off and
placed on an Agency Preferred List and a Citywide Preferred List. Bumping
-
Permanent and probationary employees
have bumping rights. This means that they can displace a permanent/probationary
employee with less seniority in a lower title in the same layoff unit. If there
are no lower level occupied positions in the direct line of promotion then the
employee may displace an employee in a title previously held that is in another
occupational group. -
Employees
who hold permanent competitive leave lines, and are laid off from step-up provisional,
non-competitive or labor class positions will return to their permanent competitive
leave titles. -
In
those cases, where an employee is bumped to a lower title, they must receive a
salary equal to that which would have been received had the employee served in
the lower title all along. However, at the agencys discretion, the employee
may continue to receive their former salary, as long as it is not greater than
the maximum of their new title. Non-competitive
class / Labor class employees -
Non-competitive
and labor class employees are laid off in inverse order of the date of their original
appointment to the agency in the layoff title. -
Seniority
ties are broken by Social Security number, derived from a sequence of the last
five and then the first four digits, with the lowest number receiving the greatest
seniority. -
An agency
can set different layoff units for labor class or non-competitive employees, meaning
that the layoff unit may be a bureau or division of the larger agency. -
Within a particular title, all probationary
employees must be laid off before those who have completed probation. -
Non-competitive and labor class and labor
class employees who are veterans or exempt volunteer firefighters have rights
to be placed on a Citywide Transfer List for similar vacant positions in other
agencies. -
Non-competitive
employees who are laid off have their names placed on an agency recall list in
seniority order. Employees remain on such list up to a maximum of four years
from the date of layoff.
Gregory N. Heires Public Employee Press
June 2003 issue

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