Honesty shouldn’t require union agreement

Let’s start with a few givens: Crooked city workers should be fired and probably prosecuted. City officials should be held accountable for tracking important matters that affect resident services, safety and the spending of taxpayer dollars.

And employee unions should exist to protect members from unjust management moves and ensure professional conduct — not cover up for employees whose actions are indefensible. Otherwise, they diminish public support for organized labor.

This brings us to Richard “Doug” Daily, a $67,000-ayear construction manager for Columbus tracked to the Hollywood Casino last summer while on the clock. Daily, 58, has worked for the city since 2004. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he has been employed by the city since 2004, because after a city manager grew suspicious, the GPS tracking system installed on Daily’s city-issued Ford F150 showed him, multiple times, parked at the casino during workday hours.

It’s unclear how Daily’s luck was there, but when it came to getting off the hook at work, he held the winning hand. The city had failed to secure management rights to use GPS tracking to discipline union members. It couldn’t hold Daily accountable.

Human-resources employees were supposed to have negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, with the union over the change in discipline procedures. But they dropped the ball.

This lack of enforcement extended beyond Daily’s union, the Communications Workers of America Local 4502. For four years, Columbus couldn’t use its costly GPS tracking system to discipline employees in several other unions, including police and fire. That defeats a reason for purchasing the costly tracking system, intended to save money by efficiently routing services and ending goldbricking.

The city was told by an arbitrator in 2013 that it needed to negotiate with its unions to use GPS to punish employees. But it never did — even while negotiating new union contracts in 2014. Now the city says it can’t find a single HR employee to hold accountable for failing to get the MOUs; they’d all left their jobs before the oversight was discovered.

By 2016, union negotiations were finally underway on that MOU. That’s when Daily was parking at the casino. The department was forced to withdraw charges against him in November, a move that finally provided a bargaining chip to get his union to the table; an MOU was reached in March.

The installation of the city’s GPS system was so well publicized that surely all employees realized their whereabouts were being monitored. But they might not have taken the city’s warnings seriously; the city seems forgiving. In 2011, a local TV news crew caught two recreation workers shopping, cruising pointlessly or visiting relatives while on the job. Both avoided disciplinary action by retiring.

City officials now should make certain that all departments have an efficient tracking system for important tasks, one that survives beyond an employee’s tenure. If Daily (and not just his truck) was not where he was supposed to be, his co-workers were picking up the slack or important work wasn’t getting down. Is that not discipline-worthy?

And the city in the future should look beyond imposing administrative discipline for employees caught stealing from taxpayers. It’s unclear whether the evidence gathered in the Daily case could be used for — or would be sufficient for — prosecuting theft-in-office charges, but it should be noted that Ohio’s criminal code isn’t subject to a union MOU.