Per the policies of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, an employee on leave without pay who receives health and prescription drug benefits provided by the State Health Benefits Program shall be required to pay the outlined contributions and shall be billed by the State for these contributions. Correctional officers are represented by the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA). Nine Department employees received notifications that their healthcare contributions were not received while on authorized leaves of absence. In some cases, officers had their healthcare benefits cancelled without warning from the Department. These employees allege that they followed Department procedures regarding remitting healthcare contributions.
The PBA filed an unfair practice charge against the Department with the state labor board (PERC) in April 2023, alleging that the Department violated the New Jersey Employer-Employee Relations Act by “canceling health and prescription benefits for union members while those members were out of work on authorized leaves of absence.” More specifically, the PBA alleged that the Department failed to negotiate in good faith with the PBA, and/or unilaterally modified a term or condition of employment. PERC rejected the PBA’s claim. Upon review, of the nine correctional officers involved in this case, four of them lost benefits due to Department error, three lost benefits due to employee error, and one case involved an officer whose leave was not authorized.
PERC concurred with the Department’s position. PERC was not convinced that the Department’s conduct constituted a change in policy and that the Department did not unilaterally change policy nor did it fail to negotiate over such a change. PERC found that the Department’s procedure has remained unchanged since 2014, requiring that “the coverage of the employee and the employee’s dependents may be continued by such employee on an authorized leave of absence if the employee shall pay in advance the total premium required for the employee’s coverage and the coverage of the employee’ s dependents during such period of authorized leave of absence without pay.” The PBA offered no specific evidence that this policy was changed. Although the PBA presented four examples of officers having their benefits cut due to Department error, these were four cases out of 745 authorized leaves of absence in the relevant year.
The Department emphasized that the employee responsible for three of the four departmental errors resulting in benefit cancellations had resigned, and it had “implemented additional checks and balances to prevent this problem from happening again.” PERC found that the PBA’s evidence was more indicative of a few isolated errors, rather than a substantive policy change.
Although PERC was sympathetic to the officers’ predicaments, acknowledging that the “cancellation of benefits is especially frustrating, employees are impacted through no fault of their own,” PERC could not conclude that the Department’s conduct constituted a violation of the New Jersey Employer-Employee Relations Act.
State of New Jersey v. Policemen’ s Benevolent Assoc. Local 105, No. CO-2023-174, 50 NJPER ¶ 92 (Pub. Emp. Rel. Comm., 2024).