By SHERRY HALBROOK
The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Albany has reversed a lower court judgment and ruled that the state violated the PS&T contract and broke state Civil Service Law when it assigned out-of-title work to PEF members at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on Long Island.

Employees in the titles of recreation worker (salary grade 14), recreation therapist (salary grade 14) and senior recreation therapist (salary grade 17) were designated by Pilgrim as “treatment plan coordinators,” with duties that PEF asserted were within the job title of a treatment team leader (salary grade 25).

While 10 PEF members were named grievants in the case, the decision applies to any of the other 40 employees in the same job titles at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center who also were assigned the higher level duties.
The ruling means the state must stop making these assignments and it will have to pay the employees for the approximately $20,000 difference in annual salary for the time they performed the out-of-title work.
“This is a victory for the psychiatric center patients and for our members,” said PEF President Roger Benson. “This decision means these workers can get back to providing the direct-care services to patients that they were trained and hired to give, instead of being bogged down in paper work. If the state has a need for additional staff in psychiatric centers, it should hire them.”

Big win for patients
Bernd Berberich, a senior recreation therapist at Pilgrim and one of the grievants in this case, said the decision should make a big difference for many patients at Pilgrim.
“Writing up these treatment plans, which must be reviewed and updated every three months, is tedious. It seriously eats into our time with patients. Some patients are getting only a miniscule amount of recreation therapy because of it,” Berberich said.

He estimated that out-of-title duties now take up a third to half of his work time.
Another grievant, who requested anonymity, said, “Recreation therapy is important to these patients. It’s really all they have to look forward to in their day. You take away their recreation,” the worker added, “and you take away their hope.”
The grievant also strongly commended PEF field representative Michele Routi and associate counsel Elizabeth Schuster for their work on this case.

Refused to quit fighting
PEF filed administrative grievances in March 1998 over the work assignments which began at Pilgrim in 1997, but these grievances were denied by the state at every level.
The Governor’s Office of Employee Relations upheld the denials of the grievances, and in a subsequent article 78 proceeding, the state Supreme Court dismissed the union’s petition.
However, the Appellate Division unanimously agreed with PEF. And the state would need permission from the state Court of Appeals to appeal the Appellate decision.

“We believe that this record lacks any rational basis upon which to conclude that petitioners are not doing out-of-title work,” the five-judge Appellate panel found in its decision.
The judges said, “An employee need not be assigned the full range of duties of a higher salary grade to be performing out-of-title work.”
The true test, they said, is whether the duties are appropriate to your own job title.
The court also rejected the state’s argument, that the duties were a “logical extension” of the employees’ regular duties, calling it “a determination without a rational basis.”

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