18 officers. 31,000 hours on-call. Why employees are suing Bibb sheriff’s office
Eighteen Bibb County Sheriff’s Office employees allege they were never paid for being on-call for work over the past three years, according to three separate lawsuits filed in federal court earlier this month.
The officers reported a combined 31,268 hours of unpaid on-call hours since August 2016, according to lawsuits filed August 12 and 13 in U.S. District Court.
The officers work in the criminal investigation division, crime scene investigation forensics division, traffic fatality division and the special weapons and tactics unit.
While on-call, the officers were required to carry a cell phone or pager at all times and were not allowed to consume alcohol or travel out of the area, according to allegations in the lawsuit.
The Macon Police Department, which dissolved when the city and county consolidated governments in 2013, had a policy for on-call pay. While the Macon-Bibb County government implemented an on-call policy, the sheriff’s office opted not to follow it because such policy did not exist there before consolidation, Sheriff David Davis said.
“If a person gets called out, they receive their overtime” pay of time and a half, the sheriff said.
“There’s never been a question of denying overtime to anyone who gets called out. Let’s be clear about that,” he said. “It’s basically just getting paid to wait.”
One of the reasons the sheriff’s office opted not to adopt the consolidated government’s on-call policy is because labor laws pertaining to on-call pay “are different sometimes from law enforcement,” Davis said.
For example, a deputy on-call is allowed to go out with his or her family for dinner or go about their normal routines. If a call should come in, “our time limit of response is not so restrictive” that the deputy can’t take his or her family home before responding, the sheriff said.
There is little documentation for on-call hours because there is no formal system for assigning it, the sheriff said. Supervisors can sometimes point to investigators and tell them they’ll be working on-call hours for that particular weekend, he said.
Even then, a review of all the hours would have to take place because sheriff’s office employees do not get paid for on-call hours if they respond to a call and earn overtime pay, which the sheriff said is supposed to make up for the on-call hours.
Davis said he is not opposed to on-call pay.
“Sometimes it helps to get judicial guidance about what my discretion is,” he said.
Here is a list of employees who are suing and the amount of on-call hours they’ve racked up, according to the lawsuit.
- Marcus Baker, 2,500
- Jeremy Robinson, 250
- Jesse Thompson, 3,340
- Shaun Bridger, 1,927
- Kenneth Hester, 1,012
- Robbie Joiner, 620
- Jean LeBeuf, 1,038
- Dallas Malone, 3,698
- Nicholas McCane, 4,660
- Aaron Miller, 170
- Neal Moore, 1,607
- Michael Parrot, 1,468
- Brian Powell, 2,293
- Daniel Putnam, 1,000
- Carey Vann, 1,000
- Joseph Vamper, 1,248
- Justin Krage, 2,646
- Aiden Renfroe, 791
In a 1997 lawsuit, Arrington v the City of Macon, 39 Macon Police officers filed a similar lawsuit against in which they sought pay for on-call hours. The court found the officers were not entitled to compensation for on-call duty since officer on-call had to carry a pager and respond to a call within 30 minutes.
This story was originally published August 28, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
