CWA 1180 - HRA Watch

HRA Watch

Documenting the problem
by Linda Jenkins
March 2000

Our members are under attack in the job centers. The agency, facing criticism and legal challenges of its policies, is blaming our members for its failures. They are being brought up on disciplinary charges at an alarming rate. In many of these cases, our members do not have the documentation needed to aid in their defense.

Our members are caught in the middle. They are striving to get the work done and provide needed services to the public under conditions that they do not control. Their workloads have increased along with their span of supervision. Chronic staff shortages, inconsistent agency policies and constant competing demands without clear direction from management all put a lot of pressure on them.

But it’s management’s responsibility to provide the staff, direction, tools and equipment needed to do the job. Amid the confusion and chaos of the job centers, our members are so busy trying to get the work done that they are not doing what is necessary to protect themselves. And unless our members take decisive action to place responsibility for the problems in the job centers squarely on the shoulders of management, they will continue to be the agency’s scapegoats.

The key to fighting back is documentation. That means writing, keeping daily records of problems that prevent you from doing your job properly. It also means sending memos advising your supervisor of the problems and how they affect your ability to do the job, and asking the supervisor to resolve it.

Do not assume because you already told your supervisor that you had to double cover for a week or there were uncovered caseloads in your group that it is not necessary to put it in writing. It is. In a lot of cases your supervisor will not have the ability to solve the problem. But when you document problems for your supervisor, your supervisor can then take it to the next step by writing to her or his supervisor, and so on up the line until the problem is resolved.

So don’t say that you are too busy and don’t have time to write memos. When you write memos you are not only protecting yourself but you are also putting pressure on management to deal with and resolve the problem. This is especially true if everyone in the location is writing memos. Rather than blaming each other, griping about the problems and then struggling to somehow do the work anyway, we need to be united in fighting back. Let’s do what we need to do to put the responsibility back where it belongs—on management.

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