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Today's Poll!MoDOT puts hiring sign out for winter workers
Friday, December 2, 2011
The Missouri Department of Transportation always hires some part-time help for winter weather clean-up work, Don Hillis said Thursday.
“To my knowledge, we have not ever had the staff to be able to staff around the clock,” said Hillis, MoDOT’s assistant chief engineer, “and every year we hire temporary ‘emergency operators,’ and we put them on-call for when we have a snow.”
Hillis acknowledged the department’s current efforts to downsize its supervisory and middle-management positions by 19 percent could cause some public confusion that the “Bolder Five-Year Direction” plan had led to a need for more temporary workers.
As of Thursday, he said, the department had placed 260 emergency operators on the statewide call list. A year ago, it was 270.
“As you’ll recall, we talked about retaining the same number of boots-on-the-ground maintenance employees at the end of this (restructuring) process as we had when we started the process back in March 2010,” Hillis said.
“One of our highest attrition areas has been, historically and always probably will be, our maintenance area,” resulting in a current reduction of the full-time maintenance force.
But, Hillis said, that reduction still is part of the normal ebb-and-flow of maintenance employees, and MoDOT officials have every confidence they’ll return to full strength in those operations.
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Comments
redenamel 1 year, 5 months ago
Mr. Hillis is leaving out the rest of the story. First, MoDOT intended to hire contractors for snow removal this year. The bids they received for the work were overwhelmingly more than what was estimated. It seems that the contractors had to cover the high costs they would need to bear for liability insurance to plow snow. So now MoDOT is resorting to hiring emergency snow plow workers again. Could it be that MoDOT's management is wrong in assuming it will be more economical to privatize state services instead of retaining full time employees? Second, and more significant, is the fact that MoDOT's maintenance workers are leaving in droves on their own. The inhumane Bolder Five Year Plan has resulted in many good, dependable and loyal workers being demoted, having their positions eliminated, or being replaced through obvious favoritism. The injustices that individuals are experiencing, and all workers are seeing, has turned a good place of employment into a miserable one. The attrition rate has doubled. So many are leaving so fast that it's likely that MoDOT will need to hire new maintenance workers soon to keep the level that they need. By the way, Mr. Hillis and his co-managers in the Central Office in Jefferson City all (except one that I know of) were not replaced or demoted. They generally make 6 figure incomes. The Director makes over $160,000, quite a bit more than the governor makes. They were spared what they are putting their low-paid employees through.
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