BILL ANALYSIS �
AB 1655
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Date of Hearing: April 18, 2012
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Felipe Fuentes, Chair
AB 1655 (Dickinson) - As Amended: March 20, 2012
Policy Committee: PERSSVote:4-1
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
No Reimbursable:
SUMMARY
This bill enacts the Public Employees' Bill of Rights Act which
provides various rights and protections to non-excluded state
civil service employees. Specifically, this bill:
1)Reduces the time period for the completion of all adverse
actions from three years to one year, from the time of the
discovery of the act that is the cause of the discipline.
2)Specifies that adverse actions based on fraud, embezzlement or
the falsification of records is valid if notice of the adverse
action is served within one year of the discovery of the
offense, rather than three years pursuant to current law.
3)Specifies that a state civil service employee will have
priority in filling permanent, overtime and on-call positions
over contractors.
4)Prohibits an employee's work from being standardized in
relation to a given period of time and prohibits an employee
from being compelled to perform extra work - including work
caused by vacancies, furloughs or layoffs - without fair
compensation.
5)Establishes specific rights for professionally licensed state
employees, including a prohibition against an unlicensed
supervisor infringing on the judgment of a licensed employee
with regard to his or her work product.
6)States that a grievance filed by an employee shall be resolved
in favor the employee if the employer does not respond within
the timeframes established by the governing Memorandum of
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Understanding.
FISCAL EFFECT
1)Significant costs, General Fund and special funds, in the
range of $500,000 annually statewide, for employers to deal
with shortened timeframes for adverse actions. These costs
would diminish after the existing backlog is reduced.
2)Several of the provisions, including those giving civil
service employees priority in filling overtime and on-call
positions, and those prohibiting employers from compelling
employees to perform extra work without fair compensation,
could be interpreted in ways that raise wage and overtime
costs significantly. For example, the state generally does
not have to pay overtime, either directly or indirectly, for
employees that are classified as exempt from the federal Fair
Labor Standards Act, so this provision would be a new
obligation on the state. Actual costs are unknown, but if
these provisions were to raise overall compensation costs by
one-half of one percent, the state's annual salary and wage
costs would increase by $75 million.
3)Unknown, potentially significant costs to the extent the bill
precludes or limits the state fully investigating embezzlement
or fraud and carrying out the appropriate adverse action
within the one-year limitation.
COMMENTS
1)Rationale. According to the author, "Currently, state
employee rights and work conditions may be bargained for and
included within an MOU. Unfortunately not all bargained for
working conditions are uniformly enforced or understood across
all departments and agencies, which negatively impacts
employee morale and undermines expectations of public
employees. In turn employer - employee relations tend to be
unsettled and unstable. Statutorily defining an employee's
rights will help ensure that essential working conditions are
met, enhance and clarify the expectations of employees and
management alike, and improve the working relationship between
rank and file workers and state managers, which in turn
results in improved worker productivity."
2)Support. Supporters, including AFSCME and SEIU Local 1000,
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argue the provisions of this bill are essential to
safeguarding state employees' rights, as well as reducing the
occurrence of the contracting out of services, which burdens
California with millions of dollars of unnecessary costs.
They also argue that this bill would greatly help to protect
the interests of California and its public employees by
preventing the abuse of the investigation process, which
prevents employees from being able to defend themselves
adequately.
3)Background. Existing law includes numerous provisions
defining the rights of employers and public employees in the
workplace. It also establishes collective bargaining for most
employees who are not designated manager or supervisor, where
terms and conditions of employment are subject to negotiations
between the employer and the employees' exclusive
representative.
Current law authorizes an appointing power to take adverse
action against an employee for specified causes, and
establishes administrative procedures for review of an adverse
action by the State Personnel Board. An adverse action is
required to commence within three years of the cause for
discipline, or in the case of fraud, embezzlement or
falsification, three years after the discovery of the
activity. Current law also provides for enhanced rights and
protections for public safety officers and firefighters,
reflecting circumstances particular to their jobs. These
include tighter timeframes for employers to commence adverse
actions.
4) Issues . This bill raises important issues, including:
a) Codifying new employee rights and other provisions that
are normally subject to collective bargaining.
b) Repeating protections and rights found elsewhere in law.
c) Shortening the period for completing an adverse action
from three years to one year.
d) Shortens the period for completing an adverse action
based on fraud, embezzlement, or the falsification of
records, from three years dating from the discovery of the
misconduct to one year dating from when the discovery.
Some of these cases are complex and require a significant
amount of time for investigation. The elimination of the
current three-years from time of discovery for fraud or
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embezzlement cases would reduce the chances for the state
to fully investigate or bring an adverse action based on
these serious cases.
e) Granting priority to state employees in filling
permanent, overtime and on-call positions over excluded
employees and contractors. These provisions giving
priority to civil service employees appear to conflict
generally with the merit civil service system established
by Article 7of the State Constitution.
f) Prohibiting employees from being required to do extra
work without fair compensation. It is not clear what extra
work is, but it could be construed to mean any increase in
workload, even if it can be done within the customary
working hours.
g) The prohibition on the infringement of the professional
judgment of licensed professionals is extremely broad. For
example, engineers at Caltrans are in positions that
determine policy; they are not limited to technical work.
This bill would seem to prohibit questioning or changing
policy recommendations made by licensed professionals.
5)Opposition . Opponents, including the Chamber of Commerce,
state that AB 1655 would, "?place into law new employee rights
and other provisions that are normally subject to collective
bargaining. At a time when creating and maintaining jobs in
the state should be paramount, AB 1655 would incur significant
cost, in the range of several hundreds of thousands of dollars
annually statewide, for employers to deal with tighter
timeframes for serving notices and completing investigations
related to adverse actions."
6)Previous legislation . This bill is similar to AB 1744
(Portantino) of 2010 and AB 920 of 2011, both of which were
held on the Suspense File of this committee.
Analysis Prepared by : Roger Dunstan / APPR. / (916) 319-2081