NAGE Attorney Wins Arbitration Awarding Members Significant Travel Expense Reimbursements
November 27, 2007
An arbitrator has ordered the Commonwealth to reimburse Parole Board Victim Service Coordinators for travel expenses they incurred over a 10-month period they were required to commute to temporary assignments.
Theresa McGoldrick, president of Unit 6, Local 207, which represents the Coordinators, filed a class action grievance on behalf of the members when she learned of the contract violation.
"The contract is clear about when people are entitled to reimbursement, and the Parole Board just steamrolled right over it," McGoldrick said. "You wouldn't require an employee to buy her own airline ticket to travel from her home office to a regional office and then not reimburse her. This was a similar situation, although it involved reimbursement for driving expenses."
NAGE Attorney John Mackin successfully argued that the Parole Board had violated Section 11.1 of the employees’ collective bargaining agreement when it refused to reimburse employees for mileage and associated costs for travel away from their “home-base” offices.
“This case took some time to get through arbitration, but these members will now be made whole,” said Mackin. “The many months of transition these Coordinators worked through weren’t easy, but they’re dedicated to their clients and took the steps necessary to help them. The Parole Board owes them the same kind of respect.”
The case resulted from a decentralization of victim services that was instituted to put Coordinators in regional offices throughout the state so that they would be closer to the victims they served. Up until then, all Coordinators had worked out of the Parole Board’s Central office.
Not surprisingly, the logistics of the move took some time, and victim service clients continued to send paperwork and make calls to the now-understaffed Central office. Paperwork quickly piled up there, so the Board required Coordinators to report to the Central office instead of their regional offices on specific days in order to work through the backlog.
From April 2005 to July 2005, the Board honored Coordinators’ requests to be reimbursed for expenses incurred on days they had to travel to the Central office to report for work.
However, during the period from August 2005 to May 2006 (temporary assignments to the Central Office ended in May 2006), the Board denied Coordinators’ requests for reimbursement. The Board claimed that during the transition, the Coordinators actually had two offices—their regional office and the Central office—so travel to the Central office was not a temporary assignment and thus, was not subject to reimbursement.
NAGE filed a class action grievance on behalf of the affected members on September 20, 2005, and the case went to arbitration on July 19, 2007.
On November 19, 2007, Arbitrator Marc Greenbaum wrote in his award: “The Commonwealth violated Section 11.1 of the Agreement by failing to reimburse Victim Service Coordinators employed by the Parole Board for mileage and associated costs in connection with the use of their personal vehicles to travel to the Central Office on assigned coverage days in or about August 2005 through May 2006.” He awarded the affected Coordinators reimbursement “for mileage and associated costs incurred in the use of their personal vehicles to travel to the Central Office …”