“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Richard Smiley, who works in one of the Health Department clinics. Richard was trying to help out his section and his co-workers by agreeing to serve as an interim supervisor while the department recruited a permanent replacement. The Civil Service Rules for the Health Department say that if someone is assigned duties that are above and beyond their job classification, they are to receive out-of-class pay. Well, Richard did not get his out-of-class pay.

When he spoke with administrators about it, they essentially ignored him, saying that since he wasn’t a nurse, he wasn’t qualified to do the supervisor job (even though they’d been letting him work that position for over two months!) To Richard, this was a ridiculous argument, but he was more frustrated about being ignored. So he contacted SEIU. The union filed a grievance, an investigation was done, and Richard won—just in time to have some extra money in his check before Christmas. This was the second grievance in six months that SEIU has won against the Health Department.