DHA - GA HSS Position

Greetings, Union Family,

Your 008 governing board met with DHA management to continue our discussions on the new HSS backfilling the vacant HSQRS position in General Assistance. The department continued with their desire to have sanctions be performed by the HSS, even though that was what the HSQRS used to do. They stated that it is not out-of-class work because other HSS (like those in CW or WTW) apply and remove sanctions. We thoroughly reviewed and compared the sanctions processes for GA and those in CW/WTW, and they were similar in nature. Though this ended up being work they could assign, we brought up the fact that this creates a workload impact. GA only has 8 workers, each getting assigned 14 intakes a day, and their protected Tuesday/Thursday task time is always interrupted, and they have to complete additional intakes because the staffing is so low. Case maintenance and associated intake work remains untouched because workers do not get this time on Tuesday/Thursday guaranteed.

We demanded the department come up with a way to actually mitigate this impact. They came back and said they will guarantee the Tuesday/Thursday case maintenance and task time for workers, and workers will not be pulled to do additional intakes. Intakes will be rescheduled if overbooked. We agreed to this. The department also agreed to meet with us again in January to assess the outcome of this, and they agreed to a 6-month hold harmless for workers newly doing sanctions in GA, and that backlogs do not be held against them.

Your team put their foot down and made the department aware of the mess that the GA program is currently in. We are glad to have stood our ground and got them to commit to a follow-up meeting and a solution to help workers with the volume of work.

UPE thanks advocates Nichole Gorman and James Starr.