By Jordan Jones
In City of Chicago, the arbitrator, citing “management rights” denied police officers’ grievance for not being assigned overtime for “Operation Safe Summer.”
Police officers from the First District of the City of Chicago filed this grievance after being denied overtime for Operation Safe Summer. Operation Safe Summer was a program designed to counter gang violence in specific high crime areas of the City. The City took the position that only current gang and tactical team officers were eligible for this assignment.
The FOP argued that the City violated Section 16.2 of the collective-bargaining agreement, which provided police officers could voluntarily request shifts on their off-days for either the City’s housing authority, transit authority, or the airports. Specifically, the Union contended that the City violated Section 16.2 of the CBA by refusing to assign officers from within the district, instead assigning officers from other districts.
The City of Chicago asserted that Section 16.2 did not apply to this situation because requests to work off-days for the housing or transit authority or airports were voluntary in nature and Operation Safe Summer overtime assignments were mandatory. The City of Chicago instead stated that “the Department was exercising its managerial rights to assign work and operate the Departments as per Article 4 and the Department’s inherent managerial prerogatives.” Article 4 of the CBA, the City argued, “specifically reserves the right to assign overtime to the Department.”
The arbitrator held that “the Union did not prove that the Department breached the agreement when it did not assign First District officers to [work overtime during] Operation Safe Summer.”
As I see it, Operation Safe Summer is not special employment because it was mandatory, not voluntary, and because assignments were . . . determined by Management based on its assessment of the need to protect the overall community and specific high-crime areas of the City.
The arbitrator also found that the “Department has provided a reasonable, rational basis for its decision to exclude First District . . . units from Operation Safe Summer” which pertained to the needs of effectively policing the community.
Editor’s Note (Jim Cline): Clauses concerning management’s right to “assign overtime” are not uncommon in CBA’s, although it’s often not clear as to when and where they apply. We often try to resist such clauses because they can have an unpredictable impact on contract interpretation issues. Usually, the terms of the CBA lay out in a bit more detail exactly how overtime assignments are made, but this contract did not. In the absence of more specific language, this arbitrator fell back to the more general provision of the management rights clause.
