[DATE]
[UNION PERSON]
[UNION NAME]
[ADDRESS]
Dear [UNION PERSON]:
We have been experiencing problems with weekend registrations in our customer service center. We are required to provide registration coverage 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. Currently, staff are assigned weekends on a rotating basis (four weekends on and four weekends off). The problem we are encountering is with sick calls. Currently, when someone calls in sick, it is up to either the service center supervisor or the on-duty staff to call around and see if anyone is willing to come in and cover. We have experienced situations where no staff is available to cover, which puts us in a situation of having staff work double shifts on weekends.
To remedy this situation, we are proposing that staff be placed on-call for weekends. The on-call staff would receive on-call compensation and would be paid overtime if called in as provided in the MOU. We would first ask for volunteers for on-call assignments and then, for weekends where there are not volunteers, we would assign staff to be on-call, on a rotating basis, based on seniority. This way, staff would know well in advance when their on-call weekend was to occur. We would also allow staff to “trade” assigned on-call weekends due to conflicts with other commitments. We would start by having one individual on-call each weekend on a trial basis. This would work as long as sick calls are kept to a minimum. If we continue to experience multiple sick calls on the same weekend, we would need to add a second individual to each weekend on-call assignment. We have not polled staff about this, but I believe that there will be staff that want to be assigned on-call in order to earn the extra money.
Attached is a sample on-call schedule showing how this would work. We plan to implement the on-call system beginning [DATE – MINIMUM OF 6 WEEKS BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION]. Please call me at [PHONE] if you have any questions or if you wish to meet regarding this matter. To facilitate timely implementation, I would request that, if you do wish to meet, that meeting be held no later than [DATE – THREE WEEKS FROM DATE OF LETTER].
Sincerely,
[NAME]
[TITLE]
cc: Department Head
Employee & Labor Relations