The Appeals Court has again confirmed that, not withstanding an arbitrator’s ruling, it will not permit any infringement on what it views as a police chief’s inherent managerial right to require mandatory overtime of public safety personnel. In Town of Saugus v. Saugus Public Safety Dispatchers, issued 12/23/05, the Appeals Court again overturned an arbitrator’s award finding a contract violation in a chief’s requiring mandatory overtime. This case involved police dispatchers. The decision follows similar ones involving Saugus (64Mass. App. Ct. 916 (2005)) and Andover (45 Mass. App. Ct. 167 (1998))police officers.

The message for those of us representing public safety personnel is clear: Mandatory overtime is a fact of life. Our job is to negotiatewith management to make such overtime as acceptable as possible. The lawis quite clear that management has to negotiate with a union over how much someone gets paid to perform overtime and the process of selecting who does the overtime. Some unions have a rotating list by inverse seniority; others confine the requirement to the most junior officers.In some cases, where last minute absence leaves no other choice, officers have to be held over.

Aside from the basic reality that someone can be required to work overtime, the identity and compensation of that person or persons is within the union’s power to negotiate. I have always felt that it is unwise for police unions to contest management’s requiring mandatory overtime. If we are arguing that the work police do is essential, it makes no sense to say that, if no onewants to do that work on a particular shift, it is unnecessary. To the contrary, police unions need to advocate that for reasons of both officer safety and workload, there must be at all times a minimal number of officers available to respond to service calls and calls for officers in trouble.

More funding for the state’s Department of Labor would speed the resolution of labor disputes and assist both employers and workers, labor attorneys told state officials Thursday. At a budget hearing that DOL officials said would inform their talks with the Executive Office of Administration and Finance, the lawyers lobbied for increased line items for the department’s five labor relations agencies. "What we’re asking you to do is to enable these agencies to be as effective as they can be," urged Joseph Sandulli of the Boston law firm Sandulli Grace, which specializes in labor litigation. "Please don’t delete them, don’t tamper with them".

The sparsely attended public hearing included officials from each of the five agencies, DOL Director John Ziemba said: the Massachusetts Division of Occupational Safety, the Labor Relations Commission, the Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, the Joint Labor Management Committee, and the Department of Industrial Accidents. "They really have been crippled by all these budget cuts," said Amy Davidson, a Sandulli Grace attorney.

Adequately funded, smoothly running offices designed to help settle labor disputes cut down on the ancillary costs associated with the lawsuits and disruptions, and their impact on cities and towns, the attorneys testified. "The quicker we can resolve these problems in the labor management arena, the better off both parties are," Davidson said. Ziemba called the department’s budget requests part of "an iterative process" leading up to Gov. Romney’s budget proposal set to be unveiled next month. Hearing from "interested parties" helps the department’s budget authors "crystallize" the various agencies’ needs, Ziemba said. "It informs the debate about certain items and how important they are".