Schedule requests being addressed
Article 32 of the contract states that shift-change requests “shall normally be approved/disapproved within two hours of when the request was made.” Similarly, Article 34 of the contract states: “Leave requests for future shifts shall be approved/disapproved subject to staffing and workload within two hours of when the request was made.”
The whole point of having those time limits in the contract is to ensure that the agency can’t just sit on requests and refuse to approve them because conditions could change later.
Practically in our area, many of our requests have taken a lot longer than two hours to be approved. Supes have left requests in pending status for a number of reasons, most notably because they generally prefer to approve/deny requests that pertain to their upcoming shifts, if able.
Recently, we have had a new supe come to the area who wants to follow Article 32 and 34 to the letter. They are regularly logging into Web Schedule and addressing every pending request (and by “addressing,” I mean they’re just clicking the “deny” button on almost all of them).
As your rep, I am definitely not going to tell them to violate the contract. I want them to comply with the contract in everything that we do.
But I do want to raise awareness about this issue. If you see that a request that you made has been denied, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t get what you want. It just means that, at a minimum, a supe has logged into Web Schedules and has complied with the contract. They may or may not have put much thought into it.
When you make a request and see that it’s been denied, I highly suggest looking at who the supe is scheduled to be for the shift in question, and then ask them to re-look at it.
And on the supe side, I have discussed this with Barry and asked his supes to be more proactive in re-looking at requests that they may mistakenly believe have been closely looked at.
Certifications
It’s been a minute since this happened, but congrats to Anthony Greer and Derek Harris for getting certified on D2/32. Keep at it, gentemen.
In solidarity,
Dan Rasmussen
801-860-3821