For his recent story (“A City Deal Doesn’t End Overtime,” New York Times, August 6, 2010), Chicago News Cooperative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos did not ask the City of Chicago for basic facts that might refute his assertion that employees are earning an “overtime bonanza” despite an agreement negotiated with the city’s trade and other unions designed to reduce overtime.
That is unfortunate. Mihalopoulos says “city officials said they could save millions of taxpayer dollars because union workers agreed to accept compensatory time off instead of the overtime.” If he had directly asked the city if that was accomplished, we would have told him, quite simply, yes.
Non-public safety overtime (the agreement he references was with non-public safety unions) through June 2010 is $12.4 million – a 45% decrease from the same time period in 2009. Even though sworn public safety employees were not covered in the agreement, the city has also seen an equally significant decrease in Fire Department overtime to date.
The union agreement contains a specific acknowledgement of the applicability of the Fair Labor Standards Act proviso that generally limits the number of compensatory time hours an employee may accrue at 240 hours. Some of those agreements limit compensatory time accrual to 120 hours. Despite both of these limits, the city has still achieved a $12 million reduction year-to-date.
Finally, the three employees that Mihalopoulos identified in the story earned approximately $104,000 in overtime payments from January through May of this year. Of that, $50,000 was compensatory time “buy out” for time earned before the union agreement was in place. Had Mihalopoulos simply asked about those employees, we would have told him as much.
We are disappointed in this article and its use of anecdotal facts without a comprehensive review, as well as Mihalopoulos’ failure to allow the city to address the specific claims in his article.
Sincerely,
Eugene L. Munin
Budget Director
City of Chicago
Editor’s Note: Chicago News Cooperative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos contacted Peter Scales, a city spokesman, many times over several weeks prior to publication and specifically asked Mr. Scales if the city knew what it was saving on overtime this year compared to what it anticipated saving through the agreement with the labor unions. Mr. Scales replied that he did not know. Additionally, in his letter, city Budget Director Eugene Munin indicates that certain overtime costs for the city are down. However, Mr. Munin does not indicate how those figures compare to the city’s expectations.
Our request was for overtime payments for 2010. At one point, Mr. Scales suggested that the data he provided in response to our request may have represented compensatory time as well as cash overtime pay. He later clarified that all of the data reflected cash payments for overtime. He never made any representation that the data provided was anything but payments for 2010 overtime.