Grievances correct wrongfully denied leave, fix leaky roof

One juvenile justice worker’s fight for his family. AFSCME Local 494 pushes to fix a leaky roof. Through all of these, the grievance process helped AFSCME members take action to defend their rights and make their workplaces better for everyone.

Fighting for family

Antonio Panzica is a corrections maintenance craftsman at Illinois Youth Center-Chicago and a member of AFSCME Local 3436.

In 2021, his family provided foster care to 8-year-old Aniylah. They had been considering growing their family through adoption for a while, and after the foster period, they decided to make it official: They were going to adopt her.

Panzica was looking forward to taking the 10-week parental leave that is established in the AFSCME state of Illinois master contract. Even in the case of adoption, new parents are entitled to those 10 weeks of leave.

But when he submitted the paperwork to take his leave, it was denied. He tried again; it was denied then, too.

“I was really upset over the situation,” he said. “No one was giving me the right answers. I had all the paperwork I needed, including an order from the judge showing that the adoption was initiated. But they still denied it.”

Panzica tried to work with the state to rectify the issues they were having with his application. But they insisted on having documents other than those outlined in the state contract—documents that he had already provided several times.

“The language in the contract says that the leave should be approved when the adoption is initiated by a judge,” he said. “That’s not what I was being told.”

So his union representatives filed a grievance on his behalf. And the grievance was won at arbitration. 

When he finally was able to take his parental leave, he said those 10 weeks were about bonding with Aniylah, making her feel more comfortable and spending time together as a family with Panzica’s two biological children.

“It was important for us to welcome her to our family. We made sure to drop her off and pick her up from school every day,” he said. “We went away for the weekend to celebrate the adoption. We ended up getting a hotel room, went out to eat and it was beautiful.”

Panzica and his family have recently been considering adopting another child. He said he hopes that the success of the grievance will make the next parental leave process smoother than the last.

Stopping the rain

When the roof of the training room at Pontiac Correctional Center began to leak several years ago, employees working in that area came up with a creative workaround.

They strung up a series of garbage bags that together created a channel which routed the dripping water into buckets below.

But the falling water eventually caused the floor tiles to come loose and detach from the floor, creating a tripping hazard. 

Pontiac serves as a regional training site for the Department of Corrections, and the room with the leak is where the majority of those trainings happen.

“It made training more complicated,” said Will Lee, president of Local 494 and a correctional lieutenant at Pontiac. “We had people coming in from all over the place to train here and where do we put them? In a room with garbage bags strung up from the ceiling. It just didn’t look good.”

Recently AFSCME and the state had scheduled a labor-management meeting to discuss online job applications and Shakman procedures. AFSCME insisted that the meeting take place in the training room.

“Having deputy directors sitting in that room watching the rain come down, it didn’t look good for them,” Lee said. 

But the local didn’t want to rely on management’s common sense to address the problem, so earlier this year Local 494 filed a class-action grievance in the hopes of getting the state to finally repair the roof.

The grievance was recently sustained by an arbitrator, who wrote that “a safe environment is necessary for the holding of such meetings, which this was not.”

Now repairs have finally begun to repair the leaking roof.