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Doug Krohne says he was fired from the recycling program of Harborview Mental Health Services after he pointed out the program doesn’t pay minimum wage. The recycling program pays $7 an hour to mental health outpatients like Krohne.
Photo by Andrew Drawbaugh. |
It’s a cloudless morning and the glare off cars and office windows is making Doug Krohne squint as he darts across the driveway of a loading dock to the back of Harborview Medical Center, Seattle’s public county hospital.
He trots up a few stairs to the loading dock’s door and opens it. Inside, a man in a red shirt is bent over at the mouth of an industrial trash compactor, feeding it cardboard and paper from bins that three other red-shirted workers have rolled in this morning to the hospital’s recycling unit.
Krohne has been talking nonstop about the recycling program, but now his voice drops to a whisper. “No supervision,” he says, tilting a head toward the man at the compactor. He sees a former co-worker and stops to say hello.
“How much are you making an hour?” he asks her.
“Still $7,” the woman says — more than a dollar less than Washington state’s minimum wage of $8.07.
It’s an answer Krohne was expecting. Until early April, he, too, had shown up at a locker every morning to get his red shirt and hospital badge, which he put on before going to an 8:30 meeting. There, he says, a recycling manager assigned him and dozens of others to empty containers of bottles or cans or paper on certain floors of the hospital.
But that was before the 46-year-old Krohne brought up minimum wage. Last fall, he says, he caught a news report on the annual increase in the wage, which is indexed to the cost of living in Washington state, and was struck that Harborview was underpaying its recyclers. He says he raised the issue with the program’s managers, then filed complaints with two offices at the hospital.
In April, Harborview not only fired him for complaining, Krohne says, but also retaliated against him by cutting off his Social Security disability check and food stamps — benefits Harborview controls because he is a mental health outpatient whose case is managed by the hospital.
Like Krohne, who lives with the highs and lows of bipolar disorder, everyone who collects the recyclables at the county hospital complex is a patient of Harborview’s Mental Health and Addiction Services, which operates the recycling program. The hospital considers the recyclers volunteers in work training, but Krohne disputes this, saying they are paid by the hour — he had been there nearly a year and received an Employee of the Month certificate — and are not volunteers or trainees.
“One person’s worked there 10 years, another 11. How much damn training does a person need?” he asks. “It’s a big racket for cheap labor at Harborview Hospital” — which pays the recyclers in cash.
At midday, he says, most of the 30-35 recyclers return to the basement compactor room and get a time sheet. They then go to a main-floor cashier’s office, where at least five red-shirted workers came in and exchanged the sheets for cash on Aug. 13, with one ribbing another about how much more he made.
Krohne says he once asked for a copy of his time sheet, but a cashier at the window told him no.
Harborview spokesperson Susan Gregg-Hanson declined to answer any specific issues about the recycling program, its wages, or policies regarding payee services, which put case managers in charge of an outpatient’s benefits and checking account. “The recycling program,” she says in a statement, helps “Harborview Mental Health clients acquire skills that may prepare them for future work experiences.”
Krohne says his original intent in pointing out the wage issue was positive: to keep Harborview from getting “in a pickle” with state Labor & Industries, he says. After a recycling manager “blew off” the issue, he says, he filed complaints with the hospital’s patient relations manager and its mental-health division ombudsman, getting no response from either.
Then he got called into the office of a program supervisor. With another manager present, the supervisor “leaned over and ripped my badge off and said, ‘You’re terminated,’” Krohne says. “They told me they were firing me because I said I worked for Harborview. They said, ‘No, you’re a volunteer.’”
Under the law, Krohne could in fact be deemed a volunteer. But it’s not a given, and he’s not the first to dispute the label in a treatment setting. Washington code 49.26.010, a statute that defines who is and is not an employee in the state, exempts certain nonprofit and government agencies from paying mimimum wage to volunteers, even if they receive “a nominal amount of compensation per unit of voluntary service rendered.”
The same statute also states that “any resident, inmate, or patient of a state, county, or municipal correctional, detention, treatment or rehabilitative institution” cannot be considered an employee.
As a result, county-run Harborview “could pay them a stipend that would not have to be minimum wage — or they wouldn’t have to pay them anything at all,” says Labor & Industries spokesperson Elaine Fischer of the recyclers. But, without actually investigating the program, she says, “that’s not a definitive assessment.”
It may, however, be the final word. In 2003, clients in treatment at the nonprofit Seattle Drug and Narcotics Center sued for wages for their work at the center’s for-profit arm, Seadrunar Recycling – the same company that pays Harborview to pick up its recyclables. The clients were paid nothing, but judges at trial and on appeal ruled the clients were volunteers that SeaDruNar didn’t have to pay.
In July, the state Supreme Court declined to hear the Seadrunar clients’ appeal, ending the case. Attorney Gene Bolin points out his clients’ case was different from that of recyclers at Harborview in that SeaDruNar is a private entity, not an institution like Harborview exempted by the statute.
But Bolin says, exemption or no, the devil’s in the details of the work — and he doesn’t think Harborview is in the clear. “Any time you start giving the volunteer any consideration, whether it’s money or in-kind consideration,” he says, “the scales tip in favor of being considered an employee.
“It sounds like these people are paid employees and the hospital is avoiding payroll taxes… and L&I contributions for worker’s comp premiums,” Bolin says. But with a large institution like Harborview, “the chances are significantly less that you’ll be successful in any kind of claim against them on wage and hour issues.”
That’s a disappointment to Krohne, who was considering suing the hospital. The same day he was fired, he says, he was assigned a new case manager who, in July, stopped acting as his payee on short notice, failing to mail a $400 August rent check to Krohne’s landlord.
Krohne received an Aug. 7 letter from the case manager telling him that he can still use Harborview for mental-health services. But he says that doesn’t solve the problem of being unable to access the $600 in Social Security that his case manager put in payee limbo.
If it weren’t for the fact that the room he rents is in his father’s Wallingford home, Krohne says, he’d have been evicted by now — for no reason he can figure out.
“The only thing he said is ‘I want to focus on your mental health,’” Krohne says of why his case manager stopped acting as payee. “And I said, ‘Well, how is this helping my mental health? I’m broke and I can’t pay my rent.’” |
