CHARLESTON – The state Supreme Court has remanded a pay dispute case between Morgantown firefighters and the city back to circuit court.
In an opinion issued November 8, the justices said the city affirmed the circuit court ruling requiring the city to compensate its firefighters with extra time off equivalent to the number of hours worked – or which would have been worked in the case of a firefighter regularly scheduled to be off – which fall within the 24-hour legal holiday period.
But, the court said all of the firefighters’ claims are governed by the Wage Payment Collection Act and by its five-year statute of limitation, meaning that part of the ruling by Circuit Judge Phillip Gaujot are reversed. The justices remanded the case back to Monongalia Circuit Court to reconsider those claims. The judge now overseeing the case is Perri Jo DeChristopher, who took over after Gaujot retired.
Wooton
| courtswv.gov
"We are pleased the court agreed with the Morgantown firefighters and reinstated their claims and remedies for the City of Morgantown failing to pay their wages that are available under the West Virginia Wage Payment and Collection Act," attorney Teresa Toriseva said in a press release from the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 313." We will now pursue those claims back in the trial court along with the companion claims of retaliation by the City against their firefighters."
Jayson Nicewarner, past president of IAFF Local 313 and the lead plaintiff in the case, agreed.
“We continue to take issue with any notion that holiday pay is less than the firefighter’s 24-hour shift but because of this opinion, that is currently the law,” he said in the release.
The court heard oral arguments in the case September 13 at the Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center at Marshall University as part of the Court On Campus program. It also was part of the university’s celebration of the Constitution Week in honor of namesake John Marshall, the longest serving Chief Justice in U.S. Supreme Court history. Dozens of firefighters from across the state attended oral arguments.
The Morgantown firefighters appealed a previous ruling by Gaujot, who had granted summary judgment for the city, saying the firefighters were entitled to time off or additional pay only during the legal holiday itself. Gaujot had said the state Wage Payment and Collection Act did not apply to this case, meaning Morgantown did not failed to pay “wages” or “fringe benefits” to the 54 firefighters who are members of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 313.
Gaujot also ruled that laches, a delay in the assertion of a known right, bars the firefighters’ action, which ultimately is matter dealing with the expenditure of public funds.
During September’s oral arguments, Toriseva told the justices that Morgantown did not grant sufficient time off for legal holidays, saying a legal holiday entitles them to either 24 hours of paid time off or 36 hours of premium pay regardless of whether the full 24-hour shift takes place within the holiday or not.
Because the firefighters’ 24-hour shift routinely has been treated as one calendar day for purposes of payroll, sick days, vacation days and such regardless of when the shift begins, Toriseva argued that holiday pay should be calculated that way as well. The firefighters also say holiday time off and premium pay are either a wage or a fringe benefit under the WPCA, arguing that Morgantown failed to provide time off or premium pay for the full 24-hour shift.
Toriseva said the WPCA also says benefits provided for work on the holiday are wages, monetary and calculable. Thus, she said Gaujot was wrong to not consider the paid time off a “wage.” In addition, the firefighters say Gaujot was wrong to apply laches.
The firefighters say the city failed to pay them half of the fringe benefits required by the state Holiday Pay Statute and the WPCA because it shouldn’t matter that part of the shift was outside of the legal holiday since their shifts run from 8 a.m. to 8 a.m. the next day.
Representing the city, attorney Ryan Simonton told the justices Gaujot was correct in ruling the firefighters’ claims are not subject to the WPCA because the case is about how much paid time off should be given rather than wages. He said Morgantown pays holiday time off in full when it’s due. He also said the firefighters could alter their shifts to be from midnight to midnight but have not chosen to do that. He said the change requested is one better suited for the Legislature, not the courts.
Simonton also said Gaujot was correct in ruling laches prevents public employees from delaying claims for past benefits.
In the November 8 majority opinion, Justice John Hutchison wrote that the city misinterpreted a section of the WPCA about the firefighters’ compensation was not a “fringe benefit” or a “wage.” But, he said that same section created a fringe or wage benefit for firefighters that is protected by the WPCA.
“Hence, the doctrine of laches does not apply, and the claims by all firefighters are limited to the five-year period usually available under the WPCA,” Hutchison wrote.
In a separate opinion, Justice Bill Wooton agreed with the majority about the five-year statute of limitations for WPCA claims and about the laches claims. But he said he “vehemently disagrees” that language of the holiday pay statute “should be meanly parsed in a way that denies the firefighters the benefit of 24 hours of compensatory time for all holidays worked – a benefit I believe the Legislature intended to bestow.”
“I am confused by the majority’s somewhat casual reference to the statute as ‘clear and unambiguous,’ which it most certainly is not,” Wooton wrote in his November 8 separate opinion. “Shortly after the holiday pay statute went into effect, officials from three counties sought guidance from the West Virginia Attorney General as to a variety of issues, including whether the statute ‘contemplate[s] only an 8-hour workday so that a fireman who normally works a 24-hour shift ... shall be allowed time off or eight hours of time and a half (equivalent of 12 hours) of pay when his regularly scheduled day off occurs on a holiday?’
“Years later, this court grappled with a related issue, and in the years that followed three circuit courts have arrived at differing conclusions as to how to align a shift schedule spanning parts of two calendar days with a holiday that, by definition, falls entirely on one calendar day.
“Further, we are informed that in the decades that followed enactment of the holiday pay statute, numerous counties and municipalities settled this issue with their firefighters in widely disparate ways. Indeed, Morgantown now awards 24 hours of compensatory time for every holiday. As the majority notes, Morgantown informs us that this action was not taken in settlement of the firefighters’ claims in this suit.”
Wooton says he would award the firefighters “what they are justly owed: 24 hours of ompensatory time off for every holiday worked during the five years preceding the institution of their lawsuit, and every holiday worked thereafter until February 2020 when the city adopted a resolution changing its policy.”
“Further, I am not persuaded by the 46-year-old opinion of the Attorney General that is the only authority cited by the majority – which then, amusingly enough, goes on at length to make clear that such opinions are not binding on this court,” Wooton wrote. “In my view, the Legislature intended to give a maximum benefit to the state’s firefighters, those individuals who run straight into danger every day, thus allowing the rest of us to run away from it.
“The majority chooses to water down that benefit, finding this to be a comfortable ‘middle ground’ between the firefighters’ position and that of the city, which claims to have ‘fairly compensated the firefighters by crediting them with twelve hours of leave time for every legal holiday,’” Wooton writes, adding that “this argument had no support whatsoever in the language of the statute.”
“I take comfort in the fact that the majority has failed to memorialize its holding in a syllabus point that actually resolves the issue presented, a telling omission on its part.”
Nicewarner said Wooton’s dissenting opinion is key because it says firefighters are entitled to a full 24 hours for each holiday and lays out a path for a legislative fix.
"We believe, as did Justice Wooton, that legislative intent is clear," Nicewarner said. "Now we need them to make it crystal clear that firefighters are to be compensated 24 hours for each holiday. No one can speak to legislative intent better than the Legislature itself.”
West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals case number 22-0185 (Monongalia Circuit Court case number 19-C-167)