PrefBlog

Everything you ever suspected about municipal employees is true:

The City of Hamilton fired 29 public-works employees Monday for time theft, breach of trust and neglect of duties.

The employees, frontline road-maintenance workers whose main duties involve filling potholes, used company time and vehicles to “go to shopping malls, go to coffee shops, go have a snooze in the park,” according to Councillor Lloyd Ferguson, chair of the public-works committee.
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On one work day, the private investigators found one crew only worked for 30 minutes, Mr. Ferguson said.
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he investigation isn’t over yet; now the city’s public-works managers and internal auditing staff are interviewing supervisors and doing a full forensic of work records to understand how this alleged deception took place. Supervisors could face discipline, too.

“The supervisors should know what they assign in the morning and what’s done at the end of the day. They should be going around to these job sites and checking on their crews,” Mr. Ferguson said.

But that still leaves the question of what happened to the asphalt the crews were to use to repair roads. “If they took 10 tons of asphalt in the morning and brought back nine and a half at the end of the day, it would draw attention to them,” Mr. Ferguson said. “So that’s one of the other things we’re investigating is the dumping of asphalt.”

It was another mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualPremiums up 9bp, FixedResets off 5bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 4bp. Volatility was above average and skewed to the upside, but there was no clear pattern. Volume was quite heavy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.