Like others classified by the Los Angeles County bureaucracy as a temporary student worker, Patricia Lopez, 51, was not temporary and not a student.
For two decades she has answered phones in county health clinics, a job she took initially to get off welfare. Today, Lopez works about 39 hours a week and takes home little more than $1,000 a month.
Now, as county officials acknowledge poor oversight and widespread abuses in the program, Lopez and others who have long worked in positions intended to employ students for short stints face possible termination with little recourse.
An audit of the program found that at least 64 of the nearly 1,000 participants have been working for six years or more in jobs that offer no paid sick time, no paid vacation, no retirement, no health benefits and little chance to win a promotion. The longest tenure? Twenty-eight years for a Fire Department employee.
"What are you going to do with that employee that worked with us for 28 years as a student worker, 38 hours a week? I think, two more years [and] she would have qualified for a real good retirement in our system," county Supervisor Gloria Molina said at a recent board meeting. "This is really disgraceful."
Although the county-funded program has academic enrollment requirements, a survey taken in recent weeks found that at least 73 workers were not taking classes -- even as managers rushed employees to register for school amid growing scrutiny. Among the 718 student workers who reported that they were enrolled in classes, it was unclear whether their course work was enough to qualify them.
County officials concede that those figures are inadequate and that there may be additional problems in the decades-old program, under which hires were made by individual departments with no countywide oversight. They acknowledge that some workers have languished in jobs for years and could have obtained better positions if the county had classified them differently -- in welfare-to-work programs, for instance. But managers said no effort will be made to aid those workers retroactively.
"There is nothing we can do in terms of the past," said Mike Henry, the county's director of human resources.
Under new rules proposed by Henry, the program would be restricted to full-time students and allow no more than six years of participation.
Many of the questions being raised came to light after the student workers voted recently to unionize and begin negotiations to improve working conditions.
