Police officers in the City of Malden, Massachusetts sued their employer after the City deducted a 10% administrative fee from wages received from detail work between 2008 and 2021. During their off-duty hours, officers were permitted to provide additional public safety services for additional compensation. These detail services could be requested by a City department (public detail) or by a private third party through an agreement with the City (private detail). For private details, the Municipal Finance Law permitted the City to charge a 10% administrative fee to the private third parties. That 10% was then deducted from the officers’ compensation to pay the City for running the private detail. As a practical matter, these calculations and deductions were performed by the Detail Board, which consisted entirely of representatives of police officers’ unions, without any input from the City.
The Union and the City came into dispute over the meaning of the CBA’s private detail compensation language, which provided officers with “one- and one-half times the maximum patrolman’s rate of pay including night differential.” The City argued that the maximum rate of pay was base salary plus the night differential because these were the amounts explicitly referenced in the contract language. The Union defined the maximum rate to include additional pay augmentations like educational incentives, longevity, and hazardous duty pay. The Union alleged that by deducting 10% from this total, the City illegally reduced the officers’ wages below the negotiated contractual rate. The City countered that since the Detail Board was already calculating private detail pay according to the Union’s rate, the officers were overpaid for private details. In other words, even after the 10% deduction, officers working private details earned more than what was contemplated under the contract.
The officers sued the City for violating the contract and the Massachusetts Wage Act for underpaying them by deducting the 10% administrative fee. The trial court found that the private detail language was ambiguous, and accepted the Union’s interpretation. On appeal, the Court reversed, finding that the relevant language was “unambiguous in favor of the City.”
The Court relied on the fact that the private detail provision only explicitly referenced the night differential, and concluded that without evidence to the contrary, the CBA’s exclusion of other types of wage augmentations was intentional. It also noted that the CBA’s definition of overtime pay explicitly referenced not only night differentials, but other wage augmentations which the Union argued should be included in the calculation of private detail pay. This, the Court found, was further evidence that the exclusion of these augmentations from the private detail pay language was intentional. The Court concluded that the Union’s interpretation of the private detail pay language would render other provisions of the CBA meaningless. Another provision of the CBA prohibited an officer from receiving both longevity and education pay. The Union’s calculation would have included both longevity and education pay in the calculation of an officer’s private detail pay.
Owens v. City of Malden, No. 22-1674, 2023 WL 7125127 (1st Cir.).