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Even though most of Chicago’s unionized workers agreed to forgo overtime pay and take unpaid furlough days to help reduce the city’s staggering budget deficit, many city workers continue to enjoy some of the most lucrative blue-collar work available: overtime.
When Mayor Richard M. Daley and labor leaders reached the deal last year, city officials said they could save millions of taxpayer dollars because union workers agreed to accept compensatory time off instead of the overtime they were entitled to under contracts with the Daley administration.
Nonetheless, many workers have pocketed tens of thousands of dollars each in overtime pay this year, city records show. Even though the two-year labor deal went into effect in July 2009, the city still paid $58 million in overtime last year. And through May of this year, more than $18 million in overtime pay has been issued, a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of city data found.
The overtime bonanza is occurring because of a federal law that caps each worker at 240 hours of compensatory time a year and that requires paying employees in cash for hours worked beyond that.
Pete Scales, a spokesman for the city budget office, said this week that he did not know whether the city was saving as much as it expected when it entered into the agreement with most unions representing public employees.
The agreement with the city called for workers to take as many as 24 furlough days this year — in effect, an 9 percent pay cut. The city’s data show that while the workers are taking their furlough days, overtime pay continues to offset much or all of the income that many had been expected to lose under the agreement.
Five of the 13 biggest recipients of overtime pay in 2010 so far are operating engineers, whose union was among dozens that agreed to the deal. Forty-six operating engineers have made at least $10,000 each in extra wages through May.
The three operating engineers who were paid the most in overtime were Alan Budz, Dennis Healy and Steve Swenie, who made $36,172, $35,340 and $32,327 in overtime, respectively, through May. Their base-pay rate as assistant chief operating engineers is $46 an hour.
In the first five months of the year, all city operating engineers received a total of $1.52 million in overtime, putting them on a pace to exceed their 2009 total overtime pay of $2.46 million.
When two unions, the Teamsters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, declined to make concessions, Mayor Daley fired some city workers represented by them.
Many of the Teamsters still employed by the city are making more than they did before their colleagues were laid off.