Stop abuse of sick leave at state prison

Hawaii prison guards have abused sick leave for decades, resulting in enormous costs for overtime put in by those who remained on the job.

The ballooning of guards falsely claiming sickness in holidays and other special days warrants changes in their labor contract to assure safety in prisons and eliminate mischief at taxpayers’ expense.

Public Safety Department records show that an appalling 34 percent of the 252 corrections officers scheduled to work on New Year’s Day at Oahu Community Correctional Center called in sick or took leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, resulting in 64 guards working overtime.

On Super Bowl Sunday in February, 38.7 percent didn’t go to work and 64 worked overtime.

On April 2, when football star Manti Te’o was to be honored in a local parade, 30.2 percent of guards skipped work and 53 worked extra hours.

Mind-boggling — about one-third of staffers skipping work on a given day. The result, in large part because of sick leaves, is that Hawaii taxpayers forked over $2.6 million in overtime in fiscal year 2013 and $3.2 million in fiscal 2012, department spokeswoman Toni Schwartz told the Star-Advertiser’s Leila Fujimori.

"If there’s abuse happening, we would have to prove it, and we just don’t have the resources and manpower to do investigations like that," she said.

We certainly hope that in no way means prison managers are abdicating their responsibility to tackle the chronic problem. It seems obvious that a large reduction in payment for overtime by eliminating abuse of sick leaves would more than pay for the effort.

Under a program worked out with the United Public Workers union in 1996, the department under Keith Kaneshiro as director found a way to fire nine adult corrections officers who were among 75 guards who had shown a pattern of abusing sick leaves.

Kaneshiro said the firings resulted from a tripling of investigations into sick-leave abuse. He said the abuse had cost up to $3 million a year in overtime.

"I think sometimes the department backed off because it was too long a process, too long a battle," Kaneshiro remarked in 1998 upon leaving the department. "It’s very, very difficult to fire a worker."

Difficult it might be, but it’s been shown to be possible. Current prisons managers and supervisors should not turn a blind eye to the problem, especially at such continuing high costs to the taxpayers.

A 2002 report by then-state Auditor Marion Higa found "significant and unusual patterns of sick leave usage continue," resulting in 27 sick leave days a year per guard and costing an average of $22,000 a year per guard in overtime.

Ted Sakai, then public safety director under Ben Cayetano’s administration, responded that Higa was "totally unfair" to compare the sick-leave usage with modest usage in other state agencies and national averages.

In response, Sakai called prisons "one of the most difficult working environments imaginable" where "the stress inherent in the job is well-documented."

Sakai, who has returned as public safety director under Gov. Neil Abercrombie, now should take into account how the sick-leave abuse can add to the stress.

On June 16, when 66 guards were on sick leave, corrections officer Michael Makiya, who should have had a second guard working with him, was alone in a locked control room when he had a heart attack and later died in a hospital.

Obviously, the opportunity of sick-leave abuse remains. Like other state employees, prison guards can be away from work for five days without a doctor’s note, which only then is required after that many days off.

That system hasn’t changed since Higa’s 2002 audit — but given the chronic pattern of leave abuse, this needs to be tightened to require a doctor’s note after a single day off, not five.

This serious problem has been allowed to fester for much too long. Though the majority of prison guards seems to be working responsibly, one-third of them has repeatedly, and unfortunately, proven that such clampdowns are indeed needed to end the abuse.