The Health and Human Services Commission is struggling to keep up with the workload demands of a growing population in need of SNAP (Food Stamps), TANF, and Medicaid benefits. According to Deputy Commissioner Wayne Salter, “the agency found itself unable to keep up with the workload,” which led HHSC to force workers to complete a minimum 20 hours mandatory overtime in the month of June. This is on top of a “temporary” restructuring of TWA III’s job duties to increase frontline staff and make up for unprecedented turnover. Recent reports from Human Services indicate that 48% of the eligibility workforce is in training and not capable of meeting current Human Services work demands.
With a growing state population increased work expectations are being placed on all Texas public servants. These new demands are straining an already reduced Health and Human Services workforce and adding to turnover. The new Commissioner Dr. Courtney Phillips attempted to address this situation by reinstating mandatory overtime, because voluntary overtime was not enough to meet workload demands.
In an effort to explain the need for forced overtime, HHSC gave the following explanations:
- Timeliness standards for SNAP and Texas Works Medicaid redeterminations were not being met.
- Lead days, or the amount of time clients have to wait for services after submitting an application, for Texas Works applications went from 8 days in April to 29 days currently.
- MEPD application lead time went from 15 days to 31 days.
- Human Services also went from approximately 100,000 hours of overtime worked in March of this year to only 26,000 hours worked in April.
Forced overtime and low pay are not the solution!
Human Services will forever struggle to meet growing demands if pay and staffing is stagnant. A State Auditor’s Office report released in December found that agency turnover was at 19.3 percent in the 2018 budget year. The top reasons employees said they left were retirement, low pay, and poor working conditions. By not increasing eligibility workers’ salaries, and instead demanding staff to produce more, Human Services Administration is throwing gasoline on an already blazing turnover fire. They said so themselves when reporting to the House Sunset Commission:
While staffing issues are ever-present across all agencies, inability to maintain or increase experienced personnel at levels to match caseload growth inhibits HHSC’s ability to deliver benefits. Compounding this challenge, staff retention, high turnover rates, and a less tenured eligibility workforce make it difficult to effectively respond to caseload increases and maintain performance.
The current reality of Human Services Eligibility offices is thousands of hard-working men and women struggling to make ends meet, while trying to keep up with unrealistic work expectations. Workers in eligibility offices deserve a cost of living pay raise. Texas Health and Human Services Commission was made aware of this fact in the state comptroller’s report: “Eligibility workforce making less than $40,000, regularly leave the state at a higher rate than their peers earning more”.
Human Service’s agency leadership knew about this report and yet made no attempts to ask for increased funding for an eligibility worker pay raise. Their current plan for flat salaries for the next two years would mean most HHSC employees will go seven years with absolutely no raises. This is NOT the way to retain quality workers.