An engineer grapples with TSR – what do you expect? It’s about math and numbers…

- By Paul Pickett
TSR Leave and Annual Leave: One of the quirks in the contract involves TSR Leave, Sick Leave, and Annual Leave. Everyone now agrees that if your TSRL has been approved for future use, it’s no longer “available” - so you can schedule SL as needed. However, if you have TSRL approved for future use and then want to take additional AL, you have to cancel your future TSRL and use it immediately, then reschedule future AL.

Union leaders and staff think this is a pain in the neck, and Ecology management seems to agree. However the State Office of Labor Relations won’t budge. So we are working with the union to ask for a special side-agreement to let TSRL be used with AL just like it’s used for SL. If this moves forward, we’ll let you know.

TSR Leave for Part-time employees: Full-time employees have it easy. After you work 80 hours you get 5.2 hours of TSRL. Simple. Unfortunately PT employees have to wait until the end of the month to know what their accrual is and the catch is if you are taking vacation on the first of the next month, you need to know that TSRL accrual to make an accurate request so you use the TSRL before your annual leave.

What also makes it tricky for part time employees is that your holiday, personal leave, and personal holiday, as well as your TSRL accrual, are based on your percent of actual work time each month, but your percent time actually worked includes your holiday, PL, and PH time. For Excel users, this is called a “circular reference”.

I’ve asked management how they do the calculation, and I haven’t gotten an answer back yet. So to get a close estimate, as a PT person myself, I’ve set up a spreadsheet to do the calculation. I have my monthly timesheet in Excel with the hours I actually work recorded for each day. Then I total the hours for the month and calculate the percentage I worked for the month.  I multiply that percentage by 8 to get my holiday, PL, or PH time, and by 5.2 to get my TSRL accrued.

Another quirk is that TSRL is reported to 1/100th of an hour (36 seconds!), while you can only request leave to 1/10th of an hour (6 minutes).  This seems silly, but it does create a Catch-22: if you ask for too little TSRL before using AL, or if you ask for more TSRL than you accrue, either way you violate the contract.

Management has agreed to a practical solution: track your TSRL to the 1/100th, but round down to the nearest 1/10th when you make a request. That dangling 1/100th will roll over to the next month. Worst case is you won’t be able to use up to 9/100th when TSRL ends – but luckily that’s only 5.4 minutes of pay lost.  ■