- The History Of The 4/10 Dispute
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- For more than twenty years, Anchorage’s
patrol officers worked a schedule of four ten-hour days. APD’s
use of a 4/10 shift was not a novelty; the majority of the country’s
major police departments work 4/10’s or some other “compressed
work week” schedule which call for longer daily work hours
and less than five days of work per week. As with most compressed
work weeks, the 4/10 schedule resulted in the same 40-hour week
as a 5/8 schedule.
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- In the last week of July, 1994, Municipality
announced that it intended to change to a 5/8 schedule effective
September 1, 1994. The APDEA, which not been advised by the Municipality
that it was even contemplating such a change, immediately asked
to negotiate over the issue. The APDEA believed that the Municipality’s
operational difficulties with the 4/10 shift, to the extent they
existed at all, could be best addressed in a cooperative rather
than a confrontational exchange. The Municipality immediately
refused to negotiate over the schedule change, and reiterated
its intention to change to 5/8’s on September 1, 1994.
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- In the first week of August, 1994, the APDEA
filed a grievance under the “past practices” clause
of its contract with the Municipality, a clause which requires
both sides to negotiate before changes are made in wages, hours
of work, or significant working conditions. The past practices
clause contains an expedited arbitration process. Under the process,
arbitration would have to be completed within a week, with the
Municipality’s obligation to bargain over the issue completely
and finally determined weeks before September 1, 1994, when it
intended to implement the shift change.
-
- Instead of proceeding to arbitration, the
Municipality refused to arbitrate the grievance. This refusal
resulted in the APDEA being required to file a lawsuit seeking
to compel the Municipality to submit to arbitration. The Municipality
vigorously resisted the lawsuit until more than two years later,
in December, 1996, when it agreed to submit to arbitration.
-
- Because of delays resulting from two changes
in the Municipality’s choice of lawyers to handle the case,
the hearing on the APDEA’s grievance was not held until
Spring, 1998. The arbitrator was Janet Gaunt, widely regarded
as the preeminent arbitrator in the Pacific Northwest. The arbitrator
ruled that the Municipality violated the contract by changing
the 20-year past practice without negotiating with the APDEA.
Drawing upon negotiations history dating to the mid-1970’s,
the arbitrator found that it
- was clear that the Municipality and the APDEA
intended that any changes in the 4/10 shift would have to be
bargained before the changes were implemented, and that the 4/10
shift was part of a bargained-for-exchange with the Municipality.
-
- APD returned patrol officers to the 4/10
shift in September, 1998. There remained, however, the issue
of the remedy for the Municipality’s violation of the contract.
Hearings on the remedy were held in Spring, 1999, with the arbitrator’s
decision anticipated in July, 1999. The APDEA is seeking compensation
for employees who were required to work on what should have been
their days off over a four-year period, and compensation for
the disruption in employees’ lives resulting from the shift
change – disruption which included cancelled pre-planned
vacations, alterations of college
- schedules, shift changes to include child
care, and the like. The remedy could be in the range of $4.0-5.0
million.
-
- During the hearing on the remedy, one fact
was convincingly demonstrated – there never were economic
or operational reasons to change from the 4/10 to the 5/8 shift,
and the shift change was made for essentially political purposes.
At the time of the shift change, Mayor Mystrom announced that
the move to 5/8’s would save at least $400,000 per year
in overtime costs and that the shift change would be the equivalent
of putting 52 new officers on the street. At the arbitration
hearing, however, Municipality witnesses admitted that not only
was there no support for the $400,000 figure, but that in all
probability no overtime savings resulted from the shift change.
The Municipality’s
- witnesses also admitted that the change to
5/8’s put no more police officers on the street, and that
any changes in patrol staffing were either the product of the
hiring of new officers or operational changes that could have
just as easily been implemented under the 4/10 shift.
-
- So, when all was said and done at the arbitration
hearing, the arbitrator was confronted with this set of facts:
-
- (1) The Municipality’s change to a 5/8
shift was a breach of a past practice of more than 20-years’
duration, and was a clear violation of the contract;
-
- (2) The APDEA protested the breach in a timely
fashion, and had the Municipality proceeded to arbitration as
it should have, the matter would have been resolved before the
shift change was ever implement, and before the Municipality
would have been exposed to any liability for damages;
-
- (3) The Municipality instead refused to proceed
to arbitration for years, incurring what may amount to millions
of dollars of damage, before it suddenly reversed its position
and agreed to the arbitration;
-
- (4) The shift change seriously disrupted
the lives of APDEA members and was a direct violation of the
Municipality’s contractual obligations; and
-
- (5) In the arbitration hearing, the Municipality
spent most of its efforts showing that the reasons advanced by
the Municipality for the shift change in 1994 were, in fact,
false.
-
- On March 17, 1999, the Arbitrator ruled that
the appropriate remedy for the Municipality's violation of the
contract was to compensate each patrol officer for four hours
of pay for each day off on which the
officer was required to work. This remedy, which had been awarded
in a prior case involving the Municipality and the IBEW, is a
standard remedy in cases where employees have been forced to
work on what would have been their days off.
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