D.C. Area County Continuing Assault on Employees’ Civil Rights

But they have to pro­ceed care­fully, because this a very techy area: expect­ing work­ers to work.

There was a time that this would have seemed self-​​evident. Prima facie, as they say. That was, of course, before the days of gov­ern­ment unions answer­ing to a com­mu­nity organizer.

Seems county employ­ees were attend­ing a school while they were sup­posed to be work­ing for the county and they com­pounded the felony by hav­ing the county pay their tuitions. The felony was fur­ther com­pounded by the county employ­ees’ get­ting great deals on really fine hand­guns and rifles, which was actu­ally part of the “tuitions” which the county paid.

The Exam­iner first reported on Nov. 17 that county offi­cials were inves­ti­gat­ing hun­dreds of county employ­ees who may have taken courses through a tuition assis­tance pro­gram while on duty. Employ­ees have to sign a form acknowl­edg­ing that they won’t take courses through the tuition pro­gram while on the clock.

So, the county employees

1. went to school while they said they were working
2. had the county pay for the school
3. knew the school was really a way to get cool guns cheap with the county mak­ing up the difference

and the county is suing the school.

And here’s the best part (empha­sis mine — ed.):

Hansen said that the county doesn’t plan on pun­ish­ing any police offi­cers who took classes with Applied Sci­ences while on duty, but will try to recoup the wages earned by reduc­ing the offi­cers’ paid leave.

If you came to work, signed in, then breezed off to a school that your employer was pay­ing for, in addi­tion to the salary you were get­ting for sup­pos­edly work­ing, how do you think that would work out in the pri­vate sec­tor? I also like the part where employ­ees have to sign a form which states in unequiv­o­cal bureau­cratese that they won’t not-​​work when they’re sup­posed to be working.

Final Ques­tion: the coun­try says it will not try to recoup any of the money paid to police offi­cers who were sup­pos­edly on duty while they were tak­ing the “courses.” If they were sup­pos­edly on duty what does that mean?

1. no calls for crime or assis­tance came in dur­ing the time the offi­cers were “in class”  because the odds are there would have been calls for the scholas­tic no-​​shows, or
2. the whole PD was in on the deal and knew they weren’t available

This is how it works now. And I’ll tell you how it ends. It ends with some­thing like the New Orleans Police Depart­ment, where the feds had to roll up an inves­ti­ga­tion pre­ma­turely because two of the sub­jects were about to do a hit on somebody.

Final Answer: it’s your asy­lum. If you’re not going to demand that it be run prop­erly, it will be run by the inmates. There was a time when pub­lic sec­tor employ­ees were among the most ded­i­cated peo­ple to be found. That time is not now.

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Tags: Public Employees, Public Sector, Public Unions