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Thursday, March 9, 2000

Trustees want end to payroll chaos

By SARAH GREEN AND ROB GRANATSTEIN, TORONTO SUN Toronto district school board trustees demanded answers from staff last night to the payroll fiasco that has resulted in some workers going unpaid over the past eight weeks.

"I believe we've lost a good deal of credibility through this," said board chairman Gail Nyberg.

Many support workers -- including secretaries, education assistants, caretakers, and hall monitors -- have been underpaid, overpaid or have received no cheques at all since payroll systems from the six former boards merged on Jan. 1.

Brian Cain, the board's executive officer of business services, said the problem has improved since Feb. 3 when 1,400 advance cheques were cut for employees who had received no pay.

On March 3, 167 advance cheques were issued, Cain said.

"Each pay that we go through, it does get better," he said.

REPORT

Staff are to give trustees a full report on the problem March 29.

Janet Davis, of CUPE 4400 representing 14,000 workers, said the number of employees affected is still unknown. "The bottom line of this is we want our members to be paid," she said.

Trustees were brought up to speed earlier yesterday at a meeting with 15 union members representing more than 16,000 support workers.

CUPE fears problems with the payroll system, which it called antiquated, will only worsen with board plans to cut administrative staff by 50%.

"We can't go on with this," said trustee Irene Atkinson. "We're going to have to deal with this the way we dealt with the Y2K problem and put resources and money into solving this problem."

http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-03-09-0008.html

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 09, 2000