400 days without pay đ
How I survive my 400 day leave without pay (Feb 2013 - March 2014)
Official Judgement Results
The topic of this is the reflections of me being on administrative leave for 400 days. I used to work for the State of New York office for people with developmental disabilities in Long Island, DDSO, a public employer. From, I believe, February 6th, 2013, I was put on administrative leave with pay. And then on March 6th, 2013, I was received an NOD and put on administrative leave because of an allegation of physical abuse. They thought I was going to hit one of the clients, and thatâs not what happened, but this happened because there was this subtle or discreet, I donât know how to really say it, but itâs more about people wanted me out of the job, but they canât get you out of the job because this was a state job.
Itâs a civil service employed job. And I was actually on the verge of being suspended and terminated from the local 1000 union we actually had, and it was actually very stressful. I had some reserves in my savings, so I was able to handle a couple of months. At the time I was dealing with something in the past and I moved back in with my father who didnât live too far from me going to school and stuff like that. And it was aggravating because of the fact that what I believed that I was supposed to do was I was supposed to go to work, go to school, finish school, and then to apply for a better job. And my job was interested in IT, web development and stuff like that.
How I worked things out.
The people at the agency thought differently. And according to the union rules, the maximum amount of time I could be out of administrative leave without pay while they are pending an arbitration, which is is not really a court, but itâs more like a mediation between you as the employee, your employer, someone from your employer, and then a third party. And they actually spend most of the time doing the mediation between you and your employer, trying to explain should you be terminated or not? Since the beginning, I knew that I didnât do anything wrong. Mainly in the morning, I worked on an overnight shift at a house out east. Ridge. Thatâs where it was. Ridge, New York. And the idea was, I had a shift from 11 to seven and usually in the morning around 5:00 AM, you start getting up the clients, the clients or the patients.
Theyâre mentally disabled at certain different parts. Some people were able to walk and some were able to talk. Some couldnât walk and needed full direct care. At the time I was actually assigned to getting breakfast done, and breakfast is like, youâre going ahead and you go into the store, you go have a kitchen. There was 16 beds. And then each bed we had some time we had people in the house. Some time we donât, but some people can basically get up in the morning and have food by themselves. All they needed you to do was just cook for them and then make the place for them.
But then many of the people needed to have full on direct care, where you had to actually cook the food, cut the food up and actually feed it to them. And then you had to make sure that you had all this stuff done before their buses arrived, which is usually around 7:30 or 8:00 peopleâs buses start coming in. One of the clients tended to go ahead and follow you around sometimes, and try to touch you because they want you to maybe feed them or they want something. And I think that the client at the time, their hands werenât always very clean and I was dealing with food. So I think that I had something in my hand and I raised it above my head and above the clientâs head as they tried to grab it.
And then another employee or another coworker came in and decided to say that that was me trying to hit the client. Because I said, I screamed at the client and said, âNo, donât touch it.â and ever since that time, she said that it looked like he was going to raise his hand like he was going to slap the client. But I remember having something in my hand. And I actually have the disciplinary administration summary that came up, that I would definitely release that to the people so they can understand how this actually went down. But from March 6th of 2013 all the way to the end of the year, I had a very creative way to try to make money.
First off, I didnât want to go ahead and work and collect unemployment, because collecting unemployment while youâre administrative obligates unemployment to take their money back, if you get your money back. And I didnât want that. So when that incident happened, I think that a week went by with nothing going on. And then I was put on administrative leave without going to work. And then I was waiting for them to call back months went by, they didnât handle it. They didnât really talk to me. I heard things for my union representative. They tried to talk me about different things, but it looked like everybody was just doing just enough not to get fired. Nobody wanted to do anything more. And it looked like people that were working at the company were betting on me just quitting because of the fact that I was working another job and I didnât need to work that job, and I would just quit.
But I wasnât going to quit. Because I felt like that wasnât the way I wanted to go out with some hurting, trying to hit some of the clients and stuff like that. And I felt like that was one of the problems that actually was difficult with this job. People wanted to kind of create at these stories about people rather than actually having what actually happened to these people. So going back and forth on phone calls, meetings, I even had a audio clip. I actually have it somewhere and I will definitely bring it out and let people listen to it, because you have these things called interrogations that, they will listen to your stuff on the mail. People who interrogate you are usually people who are part of the interrogation services.
Theyâre managed, making sure that people are doing the right thing or they try to keep things in line. I didnât really didnât really know about, but this was actually wasnât the first time I actually had issues at my job. There was always issues at the job. But because I was working with a state job with union, you had rules and they had things they had to go about. And it was very frustrating trying to go through this, but every single day, while this is going on, I had classes from February, 2013 all the way until May I actually had classes and I couldnât take any more classes. I was actually about two or three semesters from graduating, maybe even less than because I came back and I actually graduated a couple years after that. The idea behind being on administrative leave, I thought that I might be on administrative leave for three months or four or five, but it looked like I was being on administrative leave for a while.
I couldnât really tell why this actually happened or what was their whole purpose. But the idea behind me working this shift was to allow me to go to school and the pay for school, but being on administrative leave allowed me no money to pay for school. And hopefully I would get scared and get a job and do anything to keep up. And thatâs a really sad thing to me. I didnât really like that idea. I didnât have the support that I thought I had with the actual union job. I didnât get that. What I ended up getting was the support from my father who understood, also being a union employee, and how things can go south really quickly. And if it wasnât for him, I donât know what I wouldâve done if I didnât have his support.
So I continued to go to school that year and that semester, and I actually was lucky enough to end up with an internship during the summer as a research assistant for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. So the Brookhaven National Laboratory had some opportunities there too. But I think that I decided not to take the job there. And I think was because of the fact that I didnât feel like that where I was supposed to be. That wasnât where I wanted to actually do. What I was always wanted to do was work in the city and work for some either a startup or a tech company or something like that. And because that was such a strong decision on my part, I didnât want to live in Upton New York.
Now, my friends and family around me, everybody seemed to have their own plans too. And it was very difficult to see where I was supposed to be, working that job every day. I worked at LIDDSL, I started May, 2007 and I worked there from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012. And then in 2013, actually it was an issue that went on in 2011, but I came back in from that too. But without talking about that, thatâs another situation. I wasnât out for that long. I think it was out for three months. And I came back because I made sure I watched my own back, but yeah. And then after I came back on 2014, I started working in March of 2014. What happened?
So that was about 365 days, plus. The idea behind me working was that I wanted to go ahead and spend time working in the field that I thought was actually something for me, which was like working for a tech job. IT job. I was always wanting to be in programming and stuff like that. And it looked like these people didnât want you to be in that job. And they didnât think that you were smart enough to be in that job. And thatâs kind of where it was. I think after I worked at Brookhaven National Lab and during the summertime of 2013, I ended up started taking a contracting job with a Japanese call center company from August, 2013 to December of 2013.
And this is where I saw that the ideas that came from this, the ideas of thinking that all you had to do was just apply yourself, come to work, do the right thing and thatâll be enough. It wasnât. Looking at it right now from this point, from 2022, I can see that, honestly, what was going on is that itâs actually about creating a story that fits their plan, fits the plan of your oppressor.
Now, I believe that the job probably wouldnât have went down this path. It could have been many reasons to avoid this path. But one of the reasons why I think this path was actually set up this way where I was put on administrative leave, because there were a lot of people of color that was working there, especially black men who were working in the agency, were always put on the radar of being thrown out or fired. There was always is somebody trying to tell you that you couldnât work someplace or you could work someplace.
It was very, very frustrating. And a lot of them told me not to try to stay at this job, donât try to make a career at this job. And working on Long Island, there wasnât that many jobs that were that stable. And I think that when I went ahead and decided to go and work for the contracting job in the city as a technical support for a Japanese tech company, KDDI was the company. They had a contract with Mitsubishi bank. And I used to do tech support over the phone with them from the New York City office and talking with clients that lived at work in the New Jersey office, right across the Hudson River.
And I realized even there, there was a problem. I think one of the things that I might have seen was that there was this desire that you were supposed to go ahead and follow the plan of either you was to go to work, get married, and then youâre supposed to have a job. And then once you are married, you have a job, then they would want you to be there. They didnât really want you to be there if you didnât have those things. Now, me, looking at my family and knowing how if a marriage, a relationship, my parents wasnât really in the best condition, that I knew that it was the best if I went ahead and just made sure that I was going to go into a relationship that was going to really help me fulfill the role of husband or father.
I didnât really see that happening because a lot of the jobs were very shaky and I can see that there was more going on than I could understand. So when the contract ended at KDDI, it was very abrupt. It looked like as if I went there, I took some pictures, they had a little Christmas thing, and then all of a sudden, boom, I was put out December 17 or something like that. And luckily, a day or two after that, I got the call back about out me reporting back to the agency for the hearing. And so it was kind of nice. I told Paul about that. I was like, look at that. So as soon as I went ahead and this ended, the hearing for the thing comes up, so it basically was sometime in January. I went ahead and had the hearing in January, the woman that basically made the allegation never showed up.
The Arbitration Hearing
The arbitrator told my employer that him being out of work this long is unacceptable. That even if at this point he was actually not. If he actually did hit the person, and we came to that conclusion, that I wouldâve still wouldâve ordered him to have all his money back. It really wasnât that much money. It was $40,000. I mean to be out of work for a whole year and then to have bills to have to pay, you canât pay them. And the thing about it was that I didnât have work lined up. And this is why I think that having a business is so important, because if I wouldâve had a business of my own where I could recoup those funds, having that problem wouldnât have sabotaged me.
Why owning your own business is so important.
And this is why I think everybody in society should have, they should have some sort of business. A business that allows you as the business owner, youâre still providing services to people, but youâre not necessarily subjected to having to do things that you donât want to do. Because if you basically have it where you are working a job, and your job is the only thing that brings you income, and if you donât have the income, then you start doing things to anyone just to keep your job. And thatâs a dangerous person to have at your job. Thatâs a dangerous person. You donât really want to have a person like that working for you because theyâre unpredictable. And they can lead you to some areas in your company that could have catastrophic effects.
If you know anything that people are willing to go ahead and lie on people, like the woman did, just to keep her job, and she can actually can make herself believe that sheâs absolutely right. And sheâs probably not. And Iâm going to go ahead and release the form as a PDF so people actually can read it themselves so that they can understand whatâs going on. Iâll leave a link here in the description. And the idea about is not to put, Iâm probably going to block out some names, but if you guys want the actual names, you can sign up for my membership, but other than that, thatâs basically going to be it for this. I want to go ahead and just thank everybody for listening.
After that time, I got the reward from being on administrative of leave, and I started working again. But even after I came back to work, I didnât go back to the same house. They moved me to another house and I was living in Brooklyn already. So it was very hard for me to come back and forth to the city. I just chose to stay there because I was already working in Long Island. I could have worked in the city, but both jobs I was working, I was working at Cablevision as a contractor, as a programmer at Cablevision, and then I was working at the state overnight. And both jobs, even though I had it, it was very shaky.
There was a lot of different things they have with you. For example, mandatory. It was mandatory overtime where you had to go ahead and you had to work the following shift after your shift, if the person who was supposed to work your mornings, for example, I work your overnight shift and the person didnât come on the day shift, you would have to work the day shift, and the management at the job, wasnât trying to help you at all. They already tricked themselves into believing that not helping you was actually in your best interest.
So I definitely believe that this is something that you just have to deal with. I donât know how else to really explain it, but it was a lot of different things that they were trying to do, all different types of things, trying to get rid of you. They thought they could just get you to do anything. And I just thought that I can get the job at Cablevision to help me out, but Iâll leave the Cablevision job for another day, for another program, for another type of thing. Because I think itâs actually important to talk about it.