A small victory for the staff at the Texas Youth Commission: They’re actually going to be getting paid for the job they’re doing.
TYC acting Executive Director Dimitria D. Pope this morning ordered an end to the decision suspending overtime payments to staff and instructed them to be paid for additional hours worked over the last two months before Christmas.
Since its massive purges earlier in the year, the juvenile prison system has been dependent on overtime to operate. How dependent? The estimated overtime cost for October and November comes in at $1.4 million, roughly equivalent to the traditional annual overtime budget. According to TYC’s director of public affairs, Jim Hurley, the agency knew the old overtime budget was irrelevant. After all, they had sacked a lot of staff and upped their staff-inmate ratios, meaning the overtime bill was inevitably going to skyrocket until the 2,024 empty positions could be filled. But this change in the model meant TYC was working on a new methodology to calculate how much they needed. Until it could be calculated, they suspended the payments, which was exactly what an overstretched staff, already working massively extended shifts, wanted to hear.
There is, however, no word on whether this sees the return of the infamous “overtime bank,” the 120 hours stockpiled to be paid off at an undetermined date. And for those of you wondering how this current bill will be paid off, the agency announced – with no note of satire – the cash will come from “money budgeted for staff positions that are currently vacant.”
If you’re wondering what the conclusion of the study into overtime demand came up with, the press release handily sums it up: “The internal review affirmed that the shortage of juvenile corrections officers at numerous TYC facilities was the major factor leading to overtime payments.”
This article appears in November 23 • 2007.
