Union Grievance Highlights “Breach of Contract”
Volume 48, Issue 9
By Mark Bulliet

Without the approval of the village board, and despite an agreement to give out pay raises of only three-and-a-half percent to village employees, Ocean Beach Mayor Natalie Rogers gave a pay raise of more than 10 percent to one member of the village’s administrative staff in the new budget, union leader Shoshanna McCollum and village officials said.
Administrative assistant Susan Cafuoco, who has worked for the village for more than three-and-a-half years, received a 12.8-percent raise in the 2004-2005 budget, which went into effect on June 1.
The raise is one of three items in a union grievance McCollum filed with the village, which also alleges that Cafuoco, a part-time worker, receives benefits to which part-time workers are not entitled.
The rest of the village’s employees – from the workers at the sewage treatment plant to the chief of police – were given 3.5-percent raises. Though most workers in the village are not members of the civil service union chapter McCollum leads, and only some are required to be given raises equivalent to those given to union workers under New York State law, the mayor and the trustees agreed to peg the raises of all employees to the union rate, village trustees said.
The Ocean Beach administration, aside from the mayor, was apparently ignorant of the larger-than-average raise until McCollum, who is an archivist in the village office, brought it to light through a union grievance. However, the steps she took to discover the information have been called into question, with some in the administration saying she may have unethically searched documents in the village office to find out about the raise.
McCollum, a village employee for nine years, claims that the documents were not classified and that she was not on a fishing expedition when she discovered the raise.
What most parties can agree on, however, is that the raise was out of the ordinary, the board of trustees was unaware of the raise, and the mayor alone decided to hand it out.
McCollum filed a union grievance with the village on July 16, saying that Cafuoco’s raise violated the recognition clause of the collective bargaining agreement which stipulates that anyone with a union job title must be given the same raise as the other union members. Cafuoco’s job title at the time, administrative assistant, is among eight such titles, McCollum and a labor relations specialist said.
Although the Ocean Beach union, a chapter of Civil Service Employees Association Local 1000, is only three members strong, McCollum asserts that this is a violation of the contract between the union and the village administration.
“Upon serving this grievance to my supervisor [village treasurer Mary Anne Minerva], within two days, two of the trustees came up to me and personally thanked me, because apparently the mayor had bestowed this generous increase without their consent and knowledge,” McCollum said. “So we’re not talking about whether you’re pro- or anti-union here. We’re talking about a breach of contract.”
Mayor Rogers declined comment for this article, saying only that some of the information McCollum had provided The News was inaccurate and that there was precedent in the village’s history for what she had done.
Cafuoco declined comment when contacted at the village office.
Two of the four Ocean Beach trustees, trustee Steven Einig and trustee William Wingate, confirmed to The News that the mayor had given Cafuoco the raise without their prior knowledge or consent.
“I can tell you unequivocally that nobody was given more than a three-and-a-half percent raise at these [budget] meetings,” Einig said. “If you were to say to me, ‘what were the raises’, before Shoshanna brought this up… I would have sworn that it was three-and-a-half percent. That was what the union people got, and that was what we were going to use as our guideline.”
“I think Susan Cafuoco is a valuable employee and may have been entitled to the raise, my problem is the mayor gave it to her without consulting the board,” William Wingate said.
As the village board must sign off on the budget, it was initially unclear, after Shoshanna filed the grievance, how Cafuoco’s salary increase had been approved by the board and yet somehow escaped the board’s notice, village administrators said.
“It was buried in the budget in such a way so it couldn’t be easily detected by anyone that the raise had been given before the budget was approved,” one village administrator said.
The village has responded to the charge by calling McCollum’s methods into question. On July 30, she was officially reprimanded and charged with insubordination and conduct unbecoming by the village because she “inappropriately accessed Village Personnel and/or Village Payroll files and records containing private and personal information,” according to village documents.
Her grievance points to three violations by the village concerning Cafuoco’s pay and benefits – her pay raise, her medical and holiday benefits (which part-time workers normally do not receive), and her failure to pay agency shop fees without penalty (meaning she failed to pay a special union due for non-union members who receive some union benefits and protections.)
The grievance was denied in a preliminary decision by the village on August 4.
The decision claims that Cafuoco’s title was not administrative assistant, and so her pay was not pegged to the union raise. It also claims that the grievance came too late, as grievances must be filed within 10 days of an alleged violation and this grievance was filed 46 days after June 1.
But McCollum claims that Cafuoco’s title was administrative assistant until the grievance was filed and she was only given the new title, secretary to the board of trustees, once a problem was raised.
“[The mayor] hastily changed [Cafuoco’s] title to something else, but that was after the grievance was filed, so that was a dubious action, at best,” McCollum said.
A draft copy of the minutes from the July 24 open meeting of the village board reveals that the village approved changing Cafuoco’s title to “secretary to the board of trustees” on that date, almost two months after Cafuoco’s raise had gone into effect and eight days after the grievance was filed, and was passed by the board along with 33 other appointments, McCollum said.
Ken Brotherton, a labor relations specialist with the CSEA who has dealt with hundreds of labor grievances, disputes the idea that her 10-day window for making a grievance had passed.
“The first time she found out about it, she filed a grievance,” said Brotherton. “How would you find out sooner if they don’t publicize it? If you go looking around you get accused of looking where you shouldn’t be. If she was really looking for information, she certainly would have looked for that long ago.”
“I don’t know whether the way she got the information about the raise … was right or wrong,” one village administrator said. “I do say that without it, the board never would have known about it… I believe Shoshanna just felt it was the right thing to do.”
Former Ocean Beach Mayor Michael Youcha said that the mayor “has a certain amount of discretion” in giving raises, but that he had never given a raise to an employee in his seven years as chief executive without the board’s approval.
“If we did have raises it was across the board, unless there was some inequity that was found, and then we tried to make adjustments for that,” he said.
“Many of the taxpayers have long thought something was amiss, but they haven’t been informed to know exactly what it was,” McCollum said. “I am here to affirm that their suspicions are correct.”
McCollum said one possible reason for the special treatment was that Cafuoco was known to do political work for the mayor, like organizing catering for a fundraising function for the mayor, while she was supposed to be doing work for the village.
“If a village mayor is giving out taxpayer money to her friends and cronies, we’re talking about serious stuff and we’re not talking about peanuts here,” said McCollum. “The salary increase is one thing. This is only a part-time worker and she’s getting the health benefits of a fulltime worker.”
McCollum, who as a part-time worker is not entitled to and does not receive health benefits, said that health benefits cost the village about $12,000 a year per worker.
She said her first choice to discuss her grievances, including the health benefits Cafuoco has received for more than a year, was through the village’s union liaison, Trustee Joseph Loeffler.
“This has been a matter that we have been trying to put to rest quietly between attorneys so we wouldn’t have to make a big stink of it,” McCollum said. “But the village board of trustees basically refuses to. They believe if they ignore us, the issues go away.”
Loeffler declined an opportunity to speak on the raise, saying that it was inappropriate to comment on an ongoing legal matter.
Although McCollum said quarterly meetings between the union and the village, one venue for resolving grievances, were part of the union contract, Loeffler confirmed that no meeting between himself and union had taken place in the year since the union’s inception. McCollum said Loeffler had made himself available for one weekend meeting when other necessary meeting attendees were not free.
“We attempted to set up a time and the union hasn’t responded yet,” Loeffler said.
“Loeffler’s actions are especially disappointing because as a former police detective he enjoyed a very comfortable retirement due to his membership in the Suffolk County Detectives’ Union,” McCollum said.
“We didn’t expect to get wealthy from unionizing, we knew that wasn’t going to be the case,” she added. “Me and the other guys who stayed with me just wanted to get a fair playing field.”