A county employee's duties quietly expanded. A filing error made all the difference
A New York court just ruled that doing your boss's job – without your boss's pay grade – is out-of-title work HR can't ignore.
Lisa Theopheles was a supervising support investigator – a grade 15 title – in the child support unit of the Rensselaer County Department of Social Services. After the abrupt resignation of the unit's grade 20 supervisor in August 2019, it was undisputed that she took over supervision of the entire child support unit. That was work above her grade. She filed a grievance under the collective bargaining agreement between the county and the United Public Service Employees Union, arguing she had been assigned out-of-title work without the corresponding pay.
Out-of-title work, under New York's Civil Service Law, is straightforward in principle: you cannot routinely assign an employee the duties of a higher-grade position without a matching increase in pay, except in a genuine emergency. The legal question is whether the extra duties genuinely fall within an employee's existing title, or are a reasonable extension of it.
The county argued that full-unit supervision was already covered by Theopheles's grade 15 job description. An arbitrator sided with the county in 2021. The trial court agreed, relying on a county document – a "New Position Duties Statement," or MSD-222 form – that described the grade 15 role as including supervision of child support unit employees...
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