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Firefighters’ termination causing stir |
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Tuesday, 12 February 2008 |
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By Jillian Duke
Courier Staff Bryant Professional Fire-fighters Association representatives are expected to tell City Council members tonight why they believe the recent termination of two of the city’s firefighters was unfair.
Bryant fire Lt. Daniel Weger, president of the newly formed firefighters union, said the firings of Brian Watson and Chris Spruell has the union concerned.
Those concerns are expected to be addressed at the 7 o’clock council meeting at Boswell Municipal Complex.
Fire Chief Randy Cox declined to comment and referred questions to the city’s human resources department.
“I cannot talk about it,” he said.
Bryant Mayor Larry Mitchell did not return phone messages.
At the meeting, Weger said he plans to argue why the local firefighters association, which is part of the International Association of Firefighters, believes Watson and Spruell deserve to regain their jobs. He said he will ask the city to look at the internal operations of the fire department.
Watson and Spruell were terminated Feb. 6 for allegedly falsifying their time sheets, Weger said. What they did may have been contrary to an “unwritten policy” of the city of Bryant, Weger said, but it’s legal under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“It’s pretty harsh punishment,” he said. “They have flawless personnel files.”
Weger, who’s been with the fire department for five years, said the firefighters had swapped shifts and they didn’t change their time sheets to reflect that they had agreed to exchange times. “There’s no written policies on shift swaps,” he said.
Watson and Spruell have been with the fire department for 12 and seven years, respectively. Weger said he plans to speak on their records.
“They’ve had spotless records, and there’s been past practice on this and the time sheets, and those employees didn’t get punished,” Weger said.
This issue is the first major one for the union to handle, he added.
“We didn’t form to fight the city on things like wages. We formed to protect our jobs and for the citizens,” he said, noting that additional training programs are available through the union, whose membership is voluntary.
Benton fire Capt. Wade Marshall, president of the Benton firefighters’ association, said if the Bryant firefighters worked in Benton and had swapped their time like they did in Bryant, they would not have been fired.
“What they’ve done is completely acceptable industrywide,” Marshall said. “It’s well within the law of the land.”
The law Marshall is referring to is outlined under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Section 7(p)(3) of the law states that “two individuals employed by the same public agency may agree, solely at their option and with the approval of the public agency, to substitute for one another during scheduled work hours in performance of work in the same capacity.
“The hours worked shall be excluded by the employer in the calculation of the hours for which the substituting employee would otherwise be entitled to overtime compensation under the act. Where one employee substitutes for another, each employee will be credited as if he or she had worked his or her normal work schedule for that shift.”
The city uses those hours in overtime rather than excluding them.
“Bryant calls this falsification,” Weger said. “This is what is done in other departments.”
Marshall noted: “We’ve done this for years. They didn’t violate the law.”
Marshall said the Benton firefighters’ association will attend the meeting tonight in support of the Bryant firefighters.
Weger said all but four Bryant firefighters — one of those is the chief who can’t join by law — are members of the union. There are 45 firefighters in the department, which shifted from a volunteer force to a full-time department last year.
Situations like this appear to be “growing pains” of becoming a full-time fire department, Weger said. “It’s like reinventing the wheel.”
Weger said that since what his former co-workers did was legal, it causes the firefighters’ association to question why they were terminated.
He said Watson and Spruell haven’t always agreed with their chief, Cox.
“They stood up to him and didn’t always go along with his plan. That’s our concern. People are scared to lose their jobs,” Weger added.
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