Prisons shed temp staff after limits on hourly pay imposed

Workers paid wrong rate asked to quit or pay back

MADISON – In a sign the Department of Corrections could run into trouble filling prison jobs, the number of temporary workers in the agency has dropped by more than 60% in recent months.

The number of temporary jobs has plummeted from 70 to 25 since July at the department. That’s when a prison official warned that limits on how much temporary workers can be paid would make it much harder to fill those jobs.

News of the drop came as a second state agency acknowledged that, like the Department of Corrections, it had paid some workers more than it should have. It forced the employees to quit or pay back money — a move employment attorneys called illegal.

The Department of Corrections this summer told 12 temporary employees it had overpaid them — in some cases for years — and said they had to quit or pay back hundreds or thousands of dollars each. Five stayed on and seven quit, including one who was told she owed the state nearly $15,000.

Most of the employees were paid $20 an hour, but state officials determined they couldn’t pay them more than $16 an hour under state law.

That could create more challenges for filling prison jobs in the future.

To fill temporary prison jobs, the state almost always uses retired correctional officers because they have already received the extensive training needed for the job. If the state hired workers who didn’t have a background in corrections, it would have to provide them with weeks of costly training.

Few retirees would be willing to accept $16 an hour for temporary shifts, the chief of staffing for the Department of Corrections warned a Department of Administration official in July, according to emails released under the state’s open records law.

Finding officers at that rate “would be difficult if not impossible,” wrote Jim Feldhausen, the chief of staffing and compensation for the Department of Corrections. He sent his email to Tom Sandine, the director of recruitment for the Department of Administration.

“I’m virtually certain that none of our retirees would come back for $16.00/hour as LTEs,” Feldhausen wrote in another email, using an acronym for limited-term employees.

As of July 1 — just weeks before Feldhausen sent his emails — the Department of Corrections had 70 temporary workers, according to that department. By Oct. 13, the number of temporary workers had dropped by nearly two-thirds, to 25.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said temporary workers are used on an “as-needed basis,” adding in an email that it “would not be accurate to assume that the number of correctional officers has changed for any reason other than the department’s need for LTE correctional officers at any specific time.”

Meanwhile, a similar issue has surfaced at the Department of Health Services.

In June, the agency determined it was overpaying half a dozen temporary psychiatric care technicians at Winnebago Mental Health Institute. Those employees were being paid between $16.68 and $17.63 an hour, but state officials determined they should have been making $15.20 an hour.

When they were hired, the employees were told they would be making the higher amounts.

Over the following months, the Department of Health Services determined the employees needed to quit or pay back between $557 and $2,313 each.

Employment attorney David Zoeller said the state could unilaterally change what it pays its employees for future work, but could not try to recover money it had already paid them when it had been paying them what it said it would.

“Generally, where an employer promises to pay wages at a certain rate, and an employee provides the requested work, the employer is obliged to pay wages at the promised rate,” Zoeller told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by email.

If they sued and won, the employees could keep the money in dispute, receive damages worth half that amount again and get their attorney fees paid, he said.

His views on the state’s inability to claim the money echo those of Jeff Hynes, the president of the Wisconsin Employment Lawyers Association. In September, Hynes said it was “unbelievable” the state would try to recoup money from employees when they had been paid what they told they would be paid.

Of the Department of Health Services employees, two remain at Winnebago — one as a temporary employee and one now as a permanent employee. The Department of Health Services is seeking $945 from one of them and $1,467 from the other.

Neither employee responded to a request for comment from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

One of the six employees had left Winnebago by the time the issue was discovered and the other three have quit since then, according to the Department of Health Services.

Department spokeswoman Julie Lund said the overpayments were made because officials missed a change in state law that took effect last year that limited how much they could pay certain temporary workers under the state’s compensation plan.

“We regret the error, and the impact it is having on those affected, but we also recognize we operate on taxpayer dollars under the rules in the comp plan,” Lund said by email. “Unfortunately, a handful of LTEs were hired at rates that we were not authorized to pay.”