After an extended stay on the bench, one would think a " day off " would be the last thing a guy like me would look for. Well the program I am on in the sandbox provides a "day off" once a week, unlike the DOD ones I worked before where you were locked into a 7 day a week, 12 hour a day schedule for the term of the contract. Even though those who work on the 7 day a week schedule get R&R, working 5-6 months straight on a 84 hour a week schedule w/o a day off wears down even the strongest of workers. So the 6 day week deal seems like a better idea.
The key thing is there isn't anywhere to go on the day off. Unlike being at home, you can't take a ride to the beach, visit friends or even go out for a bite. The nature of this assignment means you accept certain "limitations" along with the assignment. No worries, as I was aware of what would be required before heading out overseas. I understand the issues presented and I am glad to be here, helping others who need it and also providing what is needed for my family.
Working overseas is not ideal but there are situations that many face today which are much much worse. Middle aged workers out of work and/or underemployed, families facing foreclosure, people that sacrificed to provide a college education for their kids see them graduate into a rough economy and a general feeling that there is a complete lack of leadership from the present administration and those in charge on our state level.
People at home are scared of what the future holds. Many are presently still out of work in a morbid economy that has produced stagnant wage levels, no opportunity for workers who have spent their lives building a solid career with hard work, while local/state/federal employees have rewarded themselves with lifetime income & benefits on the taxpayers to the detriment of all others by rigging the system. Add to that politicians who are dedicated only to their own reelection.
Yeah, it is a depressing set of circumstances all the way around. Sorry to be a real buzz kill. I'd be lying to you if I didn't tell it like it is.
What can each of us do ? Too many sit on the sidelines when it comes to voting and being aware of what is going on in your local town and state politics. Like baseball, you can't tell the players without a score card. Be aware of what is going on.
One of the first rules of being in an area that is problematic and/or dangerous is to be " situationally aware". To wit, understand the nature of your location and/or battlefield, where the problems can be and how you can best prepare yourself to face adversity. The average family at home finds itself facing much adversity. If this is so, why are so many willing to ignore the actions of those who game the system and make it tougher for families to provide for themselves and their future? If you don't think daily life for most is a "battle", you are not willing to see the reality of things.
Getting involved, participating in local government by being aware, voting and making sure those in decision making positions know you are aware goes a long way toward changing things. Yeah, I understand each of us already has a lot on our plates but not taking this aspect of your responsibility as a citizen seriously could be more harmful than you can imagine to your life and the lives of your kids. How much better would things be if 90-100% of those eligible to vote would vote ? You need to take personal action to make your situation better. At the same time, you'll be helping others too.
The toughest part of a day off with no where to go is it gives you a lot of time to think about what is important and what is required of each of us. I'm doing my part and will keep aware even from afar. I'd advise you to spend some time thinking about what you could do to improve your "situational awareness" on your day off. Yeah, there are more fun things to do on a day off, but this one is kinda important. Take it from me, we'll all be better off if you do.
A friend who does mental health counseling has a line he uses when he runs into someone who is saying or doing something that seems divorced from reality -
" What color is the sky in your world ?"
The State of Massachusetts Pension Fund Agency must have a sky that is green, the same as the bonuses they will be helping themselves to this year. The fund lost a total of $5 Billion dollars over the last three year but the managers and staff will reap thousands of dollars in bonuses. In any other professional job, if you were managing other people's money and lost $5 Billion, you'd be out of a job. Not here in Hack-o-ramaville. The fools on Beacon Hill will hand them the extra cash when they are already among some of the highest paid employees in the state.
These managers were criticized by David J. Holway, president of the National Association of Government Employees, the union that represents 22,000 state, local, and county workers in Massachusetts. When a Union Leader is calling you greedy, you know you have gone pretty deep into the muck.
Rome burns and our POLS fiddle....Is it any wonder why people have lost faith in those who are supposed to be public servants as they have lined their pockets at the expense of all others and have no shame at all about what they are doing?
Pension fund still offering bonuses
Agency lost money over review period
By Frank Phillips Boston Globe - November 08, 2011
At a time when few public employees are getting raises, the agency that manages the state’s pension fund has earmarked more than a quarter of a million dollars for staff bonuses, including a possible $33,000 payment to the executive director, according to internal documents.
The bonuses, awarded through a performance-based compensation system adopted four years ago, are tied to a three-year period ending in June. During that time, the fund, which started at $50.6 billion, suffered deep losses before rebounding to $45.6 billion.
The compensation is based on investment benchmarks set by the Pension Reserves Investment Management (PRIM) board and not entirely on the fluctuating value of the fund.
The total amount of the bonuses is $267,328, most of which has already been paid. That represents 11.1 percent of the total staff salaries, according to documents obtained by the Globe, and comes just months after the agency handed out $152,000 in raises to its 25-member staff.
The agency’s top two executives will receive their extra pay over two years, a total of 14 percent if the fund meets benchmarks for one more fiscal year.
Executive director Michael G.Trotsky, who is paid $245,000 a year, will receive $33,238.
Similarly, the agency’s chief investment officer, Stanley P. Mavromates Jr., who has the same salary, will collect $34,780. Trotsky has only worked at the agency since August 2010, or less than a third of the period covered by the three years that bonuses are based on.
State Treasurer Steven Grossman, who chairs the PRIM board, said the agency is reviewing whether to continue the controversial incentive compensation system, which also awarded bonuses in 2008. He said he will await judgment until the board’s compensation committee, which was created just after he took office in January, completes its review. The staff has not had raises since 2006.
But he said the central argument in support of the pay system is that PRIM must consider the competition it faces from the private financial world to attract and keep top talent.
“Recruiting and retention of top flight managers is a major issue,’’ Grossman said. “This is not Wall Street. Anyone who wants to make Wall Street money should go to Wall Street - or State Street. We have to consider the importance of recruiting and retaining the most talented people we can find.’’
But some of those who received extra pay have little to do with investment policy.
For example, Trotsky’s secretary, Samantha Wong, got a $4,828 bonus. She has only worked at the agency for little more than a year. She also received a 3.3 percent raise. Another administrative assistant, Alyssa Smith, saw her $44,000 salary increase to $54,000, a 22 percent hike, along with a $4,884 bonus.
Trotsky said both women’s responsibilities had been expanded.
The bonuses come at a time when the public debate, both here and across the country, has focused on widening income gaps, large corporate payouts, and the economic struggles facing the middle class. Massachusetts has seen thousands of teachers, public safety officers, and others laid off or their benefits slashed because state and local governments are making sharp budget cuts.
“These people must be living in some sort of bubble,’’ said David J. Holway, president of the National Association of Government Employees, the union that represents 22,000 state, local, and county workers in Massachusetts.
“For these highly paid individuals to have a payment scheme that gives them huge bonuses for their performance is totally outrageous. Obviously, they haven’t gone by Occupy Boston to see how people are feeling about how the rich are getting richer and the working families are struggling.’’
He said his union is demanding that Grossman rescind the policy.
Trotsky defended the bonus system, saying the pension fund had its second best year ever in the fiscal year that ended in June, in terms of its asset growth. He also said that the fund, when compared to other large public funds nationally, is in the top third in terms of performance, but is in the bottom quarter in terms of pay.
He said paying this amount of money in bonuses to generate high returns is money well spent.
Under the bonus system, pension fund employees can collect bonuses amounting to 30 to 40 percent of their salaries if they meet or exceed benchmarks over a three-year period. The last time the fund gave out bonuses was in September 2008, based on the three-year period ending the previous June 30. At that time, the fund was valued at $50.6 billion. It dropped to $37.6 billion the following year and then rebounded slightly to $41.2 billion by June 2010.
Under the incentive compensation plan, the bonuses kick in when the fund’s performance exceeds the returns of the investment indexes that reflect the mix of the pension fund’s assets. If the decline in the fund’s value is less than the indexes, the agency’s staff can earn bonuses according to a specific performance scale. But if the indexes are not met, the employees do not get the extra money, even if the fund’s assets increase.
The plan was devised by PRIM’s former executive director Michael Travaglini, who argued that the system promoted value rather than conservative investment strategies. He quit his post in 2010 to join a Chicago investment firm when the Legislature appeared ready to sharply curb the performance bonuses. He had earned a $68,000 bonus in 2008. He said he wanted to go to the private sector and make more money to provide for his family
His departure came in the midst of a political advertising campaign by the Republican Governors Association aimed at Timothy P. Cahill, then state treasurer and an independent candidate for governor.
The ads attacked Cahill for his role as chairman of the PRIM board when it approved large bonuses despite steep losses in 2008.
The Boston Globe does a good job at investigating issues like the one in the story enclosed here.The story ask the basic question, " Why did Massport, EMS let a public safety employee work 2 jobs simultaneously almost nonstop? "
There are three simple reasons:
1. POOR MANAGEMENT - No one at Massport and/or Boston’s Emergency Medical Services Department was doing the job we PAY them for - Managing the resources properly and ensuring that NO ONE is ginning up the system like this paramedic did....We pay the Directors/Managers/Supervisors at these agencies well above the average pay and bennies for life...You would expect (expect) a better ROI from them but we all know how these things work....STATE & MUNICIPAL employees were asleep at the switch...shocker. I say we need to look at firing a group of Managers that allowed this to occur and did nothing.
2. UNETHICAL CONDUCT IS THE NORM - The way things operate within the halls of the State Government and Municipal offices, "skinning the system" is a rite of passage...Cops, Firefighters, Town Managers....all do important work and all want to whatever they can do to crank up the $$$ and feather their retirements. We wind up having to write laws to stop all the loopholes they devise because no one sat down and tried to imagine how an employee would try to gin up the system. It takes away from all those who don't do so but "it is what it is" and the culture is based on fleecing the taxpayers, plain & simple.
3. GREED - " GREED IS GOOD "should be the motto for the State Government and Municipal employees and their unions. There is no care of how the money grab effects the taxpayers, who gets deprived of needed services because so much of the budget gets devoted to perks, etc. All that matters in the end, is " I GOT MINE". If you live in the belief that this is not so, I hate to burst your bubble but the Unions and their members have been laughing at you all the way to the bank for decades.
Like anything else, we are reaching a tipping point. The budget crisis is exposing the games and will bring them to an end. The only issue will be " How was this allowed to go on for so long??" - It comes down to we overpaid for poor management and a system that rewarded too many of the worst people in the positions we where we (the taxpayers) needed the best people.
It is to weep.....
One man, two jobs, and a question
Why did Massport, EMS let public safety employee work almost nonstop?
By Rachel Kossman and Walter V. Robinson
Boston Globe Correspondents
Last year, on April 27, Lieutenant Richard G. Covino was paid for working an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift with the Massachusetts Port Authority Fire Department. All in all, an ordinary work day.
But starting at 3 p.m. the same day, Covino was also being paid for an eight-hour shift at his other full-time public safety job, as a paramedic for the city of Boston’s Emergency Medical Services Department, where he has worked since 1984.
It is one of several instances in which Covino was paid for working for both agencies at the same time.
For at least 11 years, Covino has juggled two full-time public safety jobs, his longtime position in Boston and successive jobs as a firefighter in Cohasset, Gloucester, and, since 2006, at Massport. In the last four years, Covino has been paid an average of $200,000 a year, including substantial overtime pay.
The overlapping shifts aside, Covino’s nearly 100-hour weeks confront two of Greater Boston’s most elite public safety agencies with an embarrassing question: Why would each allow Covino to hold two high-stress public safety jobs in which alertness and clear-headed judgment might spell the difference between life and death?
On at least five days last year, Covino was credited with starting work in Boston between one and three hours before he had purportedly finished his shift at Massport, according to a Globe examination of his attendance records over a recent 18-month period. On numerous other occasions, there was no more than five minutes, and sometimes less, between the time he officially finished work at one agency and started a tour at the other.
And the records show something else: Covino, who is 50, often worked long stretches with virtually no time off, sometimes 40 hours or more at a stretch, and much of that behind the wheel of a Boston ambulance speeding through the city on life-saving missions. In the last four years, he worked nearly 90 days of overtime a year at the two agencies, for which he earned close to $140,000.
On April 14, after an inquiry from the Globe triggered an internal review, Massport Fire Chief Robert Donahue suspended Covino without pay pending completion of a full investigation. Late on Friday, EMS spokeswoman Jennifer Mehigan said EMS was placing Covino on administrative leave with pay after an initial inquiry also uncovered problems.
Covino declined requests for an interview.
Why Massport and EMS permitted the arrangement is not altogether clear. Donahue, for instance, said he assumed when he hired Covino in 2006 that he was quitting the Boston job, and only found out months later that he had not. Mehigan said EMS officials knew only “anecdotally’’ about the Massport job. EMS has no restrictions on outside employment.
Massport has moved swiftly to make changes. Donahue suspended Covino and sharply curtailed the practice that allows firefighters to swap shifts with one another. This practice was critical to Covino’s juggling act. He routinely asked others to fill in for him so he could leave Massport halfway through a normal day shift to work his standard 3 to 11 p.m. EMS shift. He would repay the hours to them at another time.
Massport last week also changed its policy for new hires in any job: None will be permitted to keep a second full-time position.
EMS, which just launched its inquiry, has not said whether its policies might change.
Neither agency had a policy prohibiting its employees from having another public safety job, or even a requirement that managers be notified about other positions. Indeed, EMS Chief James Hooley, in an interview Thursday, said it is possible that Covino may not be the only one of his 350 EMTs and paramedics working for another public safety agency.
“I don’t know if I could say no to someone having another public safety job,’’ Hooley said.
Samuel R. Tyler, the president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a business-supported watchdog agency that focuses on city finances and management, said he was astonished to learn that either agency would countenance such an arrangement.
“To allow one person to hold two high-stress public safety jobs is inconceivable. It makes no sense,’’ Tyler said. “It should be common sense — you cannot permit someone to have two jobs, each one stressful, that require quick decisions that affect the safety and lives of the public.’’
Tyler said that such arrangements may “cheat the taxpayers out of the services they should expect,’’ and could leave the city vulnerable to substantial legal damages for any serious misstep by an exhausted paramedic.
Hooley said that Covino has been “one of our better performers,’’ with no hint that his Massport job had affected his work as a paramedic. In 1992, when he had just the one job, Covino was awarded the department’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor, for leading people to safety from a Mattapan house fire before firefighters arrived, Hooley said.
Jay Weaver, an EMS partner and friend of Covino’s, had nothing but praise for his colleague. “Rick is an exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable paramedic, among the finest I’ve ever worked with,’’ Weaver said in an e-mail exchange from Afghanistan, where he is serving a tour as an Army lawyer. “He is an extremely hard worker.’’
Donahue, the Massport chief, would say only that Covino was suspended “for possible violations of department policies and procedures.’’
Friday evening, Mehigan released a statement that said Covino had just been placed on leave “while questions raised by his dual employment with Boston EMS and another agency are being reviewed.’’ It said the Boston Public Health Commission, which oversees EMS, “is committed to ensuring that Boston residents have the utmost confidence in its employees and services.’’
The EMS, with 50 ambulances, responded to emergency calls 110,000 times in 2010. The Massport Fire Department, with 85 firefighters, responds to about 3,000 calls a year, almost all at Logan. Its principal firefighting training involves aircraft fire and rescue operations.
Donahue said that by the time he learned Covino had kept his EMS job, his new hire was fulfilling his work requirements and the agency had no policy barring second jobs. “Obviously, in the future, based on this case, we’d do it differently,’’ Donahue said in an interview. “Safety is our highest priority.’’
At EMS, Hooley said that because of concerns about on-the-job fatigue, EMTs and paramedics can work no more than 18 hours at a stretch. “We would never approve anything more than that,’’ he said.
But serving two masters, Covino regularly violated the spirit of Hooley’s restrictions, according to a Globe review of his work records.
Starting last March 13, for example, Covino was off for less than two hours in a 50-hour stretch. That day, a Saturday, he clocked in to Massport at 5:52 in the morning, then left there at 10:21 p.m. for his Boston job, which started at 11 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. on Sunday. After an hour’s break, Covino worked another shift at EMS, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. After a quick commute, he was back on duty at Massport at 4:17 p.m. Sunday for an overnight shift that ended at 8:10 a.m. on Monday.
After that marathon effort, Covino was off for part of Monday, until he went back to EMS for a 3 to 11 p.m. shift.
Such extraordinary work patterns appear again and again during the 18 months of attendance records from the two agencies that the Globe was able to compare. Prior to August 2009, the Massport records do not contain the start and stop times for firefighters’ shifts.
The Massport job allowed for some sleep, typically between midnight and 5 a.m., but only if there were no calls, according to Donahue.
Until the Globe made its public records request in February, neither agency was aware of Covino’s specific work schedule at the other, a scheduled that still allowed for extensive overtime.
Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and one of the country’s leading authorities on sleep deprivation, said in an interview that physicians and first responders like paramedics and firefighters have a much higher risk of making errors when they go long periods without sleep. Someone who has gone without sleep for 24 hours, he said, has impaired judgment similar to a person who is legally drunk. In such cases, he said, people are more likely to make bad decisions and have short-term memory problems.
Neither EMS nor Massport has evidence of fatigue-related mistakes by Covino.
Covino’s dual positions raise another issue as well: Which hat would Covino don if there were a major terrorist episode at Logan that required both agencies to call in all available personnel? Donahue said that he believes Covino’s first responsibility would be to Massport. Said Hooley: “He understands that Boston EMS is his principal employer. That’s where his primary loyalty lies.’’
This article was prepared for an investigative reporting course at Northeastern University. It was overseen by Walter V. Robinson, who is distinguished professor of journalism and a former editor of the Globe Spotlight Team. Robinson can be reached at w.robinson@neu.edu. Confidential messages can be left at 617-929-3334.
After an extended stay on the bench, one would think a " day off " would be the last thing a guy like me would look for. Well the program I am on in the sandbox provides a "day off" once a week, unlike the DOD ones I worked before where you were locked into a 7 day a week, 12 hour a day schedule for the term of the contract. Even though those who work on the 7 day a week schedule get R&R, working 5-6 months straight on a 84 hour a week schedule w/o a day off wears down even the strongest of workers. So the 6 day week deal seems like a better idea.
