State workers' pay arbitrarily cut, judge rules

LANSING – Thousands of specialized Michigan Department of Corrections employees saw their pay cut while their responsibilities stayed the same because of an apparently pointless reclassification of their positions, an Ingham County judge has ruled.

Ruling in favor of the employees this month in a nearly four-year-old dispute, Ingham County Circuit Judge William Collette said the department “fails to point to any evidence that the operations of the MDOC were in any way changed … except that the job titles and compensation rates of these positions were changed.”

In his March 14 decision, Collette overturned earlier decisions by the Michigan Civil Service Commission, which regulates state employees, to restore nearly 2,500 positions to previous, higher-paying classifications.

Spokesmen for the department and the commission said officials still were reviewing Collette’s decision and hadn’t yet decided whether they would appeal. They declined to comment as the legal review continued.

“We’re hoping that the director (of Corrections) does right by our members and allows them this victory and allows the ruling to stand so that they get what they’ve worked for and have continued to work for,” said Andy Potter, chief of staff for the Michigan Corrections Organization, the union that filed the lawsuit. “Nothing has changed for these officers. They still do the extra amount of work … For them, this was just a smash and grab.”

In April 2012, the Corrections Department downgraded about 2,400 resident unit officers to normal corrections officers and nearly 60 corrections medical unit officers to corrections medical officers, a reclassification that came with a pay cut of between 59 cents and $1.48 an hour.

The department and commission argued that the positions had always been wrongly classified, but Collette noted in his written opinion that the commission had certified the classifications in routine reviews in 1983, 1996 and 2006 and that the department’s own supervisors supported the higher pay for those employees because they do additional work that is “generally more stressful and dangerous than other positions in the prisons.”

The resident unit officers, for example, do not work in prison yards or gyms as other corrections officers do. They work on rehabilitation treatment teams and prepare parole eligibility and other reports that other officers do not do. The employees continued doing the specialized work even after the reclassification and pay cut.

Collette called the department’s decision “arbitrary and capricious.”

If Collette’s ruling stands, Potter said the union would push for the employees’ pay to be restored to the higher levels.

If that were to happen, Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz said a complicated formula taking seniority and other factors into account would be used to determine the final pay of those employees.

Contact Justin A. Hinkley at (517) 377-1195 or jhinkley@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley. Sign up for his email newsletter, SoM Weekly, at on.lsj.com/somsignup.