Tag: Workday

City Council, education

Spending on City’s New Payroll System Tops $32 Million; Saka Spouts Off About Tech Workers, COVID School Closures

1. The city of Seattle has increased its spending on its troubled new payroll software system, Workday, from $14 million to more than $32 million.

The cost increases have been catalogued in a series of 18 change orders to the city’s contract with Deloitte, the consulting firm that’s been implementing and troubleshooting the new system since last year. Each change order includes a catalog of outstanding issues with Workday, which launched last year after numerous delays.

As soon as the new system was in place, city employees began reporting missing or inaccurate pay, deferred compensation that came out of their paychecks but never showed up in their bank accounts, and disappearing vacation days, among many other problems that have ranged from annoying (managers not being able to hand off payroll approval duties when they take time off) to nerve-wracking (paychecks that showed up hundreds or thousands of dollars short) to harmless but potentially costly (some workers got vacation time they didn’t qualify for—and took it.)

A spokesman for the city’s HR department, Antorris Williams, said change orders are common for large projects, and that all the changes “were approved by the Mayor’s Office and did not require” approval from the city council through a formal budget action. Last year’s city budget estimated that implementing Workday would cost up to $50 million over the life of the contract, which is ongoing.

PubliCola has reached out to the city numerous times about issues with Workday. Every time, we’ve been told that whatever specific crisis we were calling about had been resolved or would be fixed soon. We don’t envy the city HR employees who have to put out fires caused by complex new software that may not have been ready for prime time. But the kind of problems Deloitte was reporting as recently as late February—when the most recent $2.1 million change order was signed—suggest that worrying problems persist.

The tables in Deloitte’s most recent contract update, for example, show dozens of issues that have arisen recently or remain unaddressed. These include employees getting shorted on vacation time; people being improperly told they’re ineligible for family leave; incorrect deductions for union dues and social security; and all manner of big and small nuisances that appear to require one-off changes to the complex system.

Last year, the city converted five “emergency” positions that were created to implement Workday from temporary to permanent. The new positions added $1.5 million in annual city spending. According to the most recent city budget, the permanent employees will provide ” ongoing operations and maintenance support post-implementation.”

2. During a meeting of the city’s Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy committee on Thursday, Councilmember Rob Saka, a former Big Tech attorney, was talking about the need to for more opportunities for local Black and brown kids when he made this comment about Seattle’s tech industry:

“Many of those workers aren’t from the city of Seattle. Many of them don’t look like me, to be more blunt. … And you know, there’s a lot of reliance on H1B visas and everything. We need to empower more people with the opportunity to have these jobs, more people locally. So that’s why we need more people from the Central District, more people from the South End, more people from High Point, and we do that by investing in digital skilling initiatives.” Saka’s comment, which suggested that Asian immigrants are taking jobs that should go to people from Seattle, was an extraordinarily poor choice of words, at best, in the current anti-immigrant national climate.

Earlier in the meeting, Saka criticized Seattle for keeping schools and preschools closed during COVID for longer than other parts of the state. After opining that kids who don’t attend preschool are too often watched or babysit at home by Mom or Grandma—nd half the time being babysit by a TV, the soap operas,” Saka said his own kids’ preschool “stayed open the whole time,” allowing him and his wife to “work remotely without [the] distraction of two year olds and three year olds primarily having meltdowns everywhere.”

Seattle, Saka continued, had erred by keeping schools closed too long, and had to be forced by then-Gov. Jay Inslee to reopen at least part-time in April 2021. In 2021, when “schools across the state were opening up left and right, it took an order of the the governor the state of Washington to order schools to open up in Seattle,” Saka said. “So COVID, apparently, was worse in the city of Seattle than other parts of the state, other parts of the country. Not true, by the way. And what kind of impact does it have on people’s mental health? Not good!”

The committee’s other members did not remark on Saka’s comments about immigration and school closures during COVID.

Courts, homelessness, labor

Burien Racks Up Big Legal Bills Defending its Homeless Ban; More Glitches in Seattle’s New Workday Payroll System

1. The city of Burien spent more than $200,000 last year paying a Seattle law firm, Keller Rohrbach, to fight a lawsuit filed by a group of unsheltred people who challenged the city’s ban on sleeping outdoors last year. Keller Rohrbach’s billing statements, obtained through a records request, span 11 months of 2024; they do not include any invoices from this year, which would include preparation for an appearance in King County Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan’s courtroom last month.

The plaintiffs, who were forced to leave an encampment on Ambaum Blvd. in Burien in December 2023, sued to stop an earlier version of Burien’s much-amended ban on sleeping outdoors in the city. The older version of the law made it illegal to “exercise nontransitory exclusive control over any portion of nonresidential public property” but allowed an exemption if no shelter was available in nearby cities, including Seattle. (Burien does not have a year-round emergency shelter).

In January, the city completely banned sleeping or “residing” in the city without shelter at any time of the day or night, regardless of whether shelter is actually available.

Keller Rohrbach billed Burien between $325 and hour and $385 an hour for its attorneys, and $185 an hour for paralegal services. Last year, Burien budgeted $150,000 for outside legal services, a number that increased to $200,000 in the 2025 budget.

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2. Workday, the glitchy HR system the city of Seattle put in place to handle payroll for its 14,000 employees last year, recently began offering vacation time to employees, including interns, who are not eligible for vacation, PubliCola has learned. The time started showing up on the employees’ pay slips, and at least six people used the new option to take time off, the city’s Department of Human Resources confirmed.

The vacation time snafu is reminiscent of another Workday glitch last year, when the system began showing people that they had weeks of available military leave, even though they weren’t in the military.

More serious problems with the new system, which is being maintained by pricey consultants from Deloitte, have included inaccurate paychecks, missing paychecks, vanishing deferred compensation deposits, and inaccurate job classifications for people in temporary positions or working out of class in jobs where they were being paid more than in their regular assignments.

In addition to the vacation issues, Workday recently failed to pay about 300 temporary employees who are ineligible for city benefits and receive premium pay in lieu of those benefits.

A spokesman for the city’s human resources department, Antorris Williams, said the vacation issue resulted from a “Workday configuration” and was fixed on March 13. “A calculation issue in Workday’s setup caused” the premium pay issue for temporary employees, Williams said, and a city team is working to make sure those employees receive pay they’re owed.

The city “continues to address key issues related to Workday implementation to ensure accurate payroll processing,” Williams said. “Paying employees on time and accurately remains a top priority to the City. This large-scale transition has been very challenging, and we know these issues have a real impact on people.”

Courts, Elections, housing, Police

Social Housing Crushes It, City Workers Sue Over Workday, Court Says Jan. 6 Cops Can’t Hide Identities
A billboard for Workday in Atlanta says, “Be a rockstar of business”

1. The latest batch of ballots overwhelmingly affirmed the election night victory for social housing, as Proposition 1A increased its winning margin to 60 percent over a competing proposition that would have directed the city to use existing housing funds to fund traditional low-income housing.

The winning measure, which will impose a 5 percent business tax on employee compensation above $1 million a year, will fund the acquisition and construction of buildings for permanently affordable mixed-income housing, in which higher-income renters (making up to 120 percent of Seattle’s median household income, or about $121,000) will subsidize lower rents for those who make less.

Businesses (including Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, and Amazon), along with the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce, poured nearly half a million dollars into the Proposition 1B campaign. The measure, which would have used existing JumpStart payroll tax revenues to fund traditional subsidized housing for five years, was also endorsed by Mayor Bruce Harrell (who appeared on campaign mailers) and supported by a majority of the city council, who voted to put the competing measure on the ballot last year.

2. Three city employees have filed a class-action lawsuit over ongoing problems with Workday, the city’s new payroll and HR management system, which—as PubliCola has been documenting since last year—has resulted in missing or inaccurate paychecks, improper vacation accruals, vanishing retirement funds, and many other major issues since the implementation of the new system last September.

According to a statement from seven city unions whose workers were impacted by Workday snafus, “for the past five months, the City has routinely issued paychecks and pay statements that are inaccurate and have resulted in thousands of employees being underpaid or, at times, not paid at all.” The legal bases for the lawsuit are Seattle’s law prohibiting wage theft and the city’s sick and safe leave ordinance, which requires the city to keep (accurate) track of how much leave employees have.

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“These failures of the new payroll system have resulted in frustration and significant financial hardship, as workers are left to resolve paycheck errors themselves and deal with late or incomplete payments,” AFSCME Council 2 President Michael Rainey said in a statement. “The City of Seattle is responsible for ensuring their payroll systems function for their employees—not against them.” AFSCME 2 represents Seattle Public Library employees.

According to the lawsuit, “The City of Seattle implemented Workday despite the repeated issues that Workday has caused to other governmental entities and without first testing and verifying that all employees would receive accurate paychecks and pay statements under the new system.”

Since our most recent story on Workday, PubliCola has continued to receive updates from city employees. About 2,000 city workers had their pay adjusted downward to the bottom of their pay “bands,” meaning that their paychecks were significantly less than their actual salaries, sometimes by $20 an hour or more. People who have planned to take time off have discovered that, according to Workday, they no longer have enough vacation or sick days to do so. One staffer received less than 30 percent of their regular pay in January, after several months of inaccurate paychecks.

3. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that four Seattle police officers who attended the “stop the steal” rally on January 6, 2021 do not have the right to remain anonymous and can be identified in responses to public disclosure requests about the officers’ participation in the event.

Two married SPD officers, Caitlin and Alexander Everett, were fired for breaching barriers set up by US Capitol police during the insurrectionist riots.

After several people filed public disclosure requests about SPD officers’ presence at the Capitol on January 6, the officers sued SPD, arguing that it would violate their right to privacy for SPD to reveal their names. (Specifically, they claimed that their names are “personal information” exempt from the state Public Records Act, and that their names are also protected by the First Amendment.)

Although the state Court of Appeals agreed with this argument, the Supreme Court rejected it, noting that the officers had no expectation of privacy when they participated in the January 6 event alongside about 45,000 other people. “[T]hey have not shown they have a privacy right in public records about their attendance at a highly public event,” the court wrote. “Public employees generally do not have a privacy interest in activities that are widely attended and do not occur in private. ”

The X account DivestSPD posted a list of the officers’ names in 2021. But the ruling goes significantly further than requiring a list of names. According to the ruling, the records provided to requesters must include unredacted “photographs, video, text messages, and possibly other documentation relating to the officers’ activities on January 6, 2021,” according to the ruling.