Various media sources have been reporting that the four employees from the Mayor pro tem’s office were fired. The official word came down today, and that is not the case. As I expected and predicted, they have only been suspended indefinately, without pay.
Excerpted:
The four city hall workers accused in the city hall scandal are now indefinitely suspended. Each met with the city’s chief administrative officer at city hall Tuesday and learned their fate this morning.
The mayor himself signed the letters recommending the indefinite suspension early Wednesday morning.
The employees have ten days to appeal their indefinite suspension. After that, they have 30 days to schedule a civil service hearing, which is standard procedure for city employees. They will be paid for today, but beginning tomorrow, it’s an unpaid suspension.
Again, as I have pointed out before, this is the city’s way of telling employees to get lost in such a way that they have no legal recourse to sue.
Indefinate suspensions are the “fired, but not quite fired� level. An employee on this status has no duties and receives no paycheck. There is no hope of being moved off such a status (technically rules exist to do so, but as a practical matter, it’s not going to happen. )
It’s really a crappy status, given that the person is still considered an employee in several key ways, including the right to work elsewhere (FYI: city employees must obtain permission to take a second job. The paperwork takes so long to process that most jobs beyond retail or minimum wage will be filled before all the signatures are obtained.) In short, if the employee wants to work for a living elsewhere and get a paycheck while stuck in limbo, permission is needed from a high pay grade manager, about Assistant Director level.
Needless to say, employees on indefinate suspension aren’t going to get that.
Of course, the employee in question could always voluntarily resign in order to take another job. Which is the point: to save the city the trouble of/challenge from a firing. You can’t sue for wrongful termination if you resign . . .
It’s not going to work to prevent a civil service appeal in this case because the stakes are too high. But that venue is still partly controlled by the city; anything the city’s lawyers challenge as “irrelevant” is likely to be thrown out. A court challenge is not so controllable, but the city will do its best to delay any such suit from coming to trial for years, until the employees are forced to drop it due to legal costs.