Councilmember Chip McCosker convened a Personnel and Hiring Committee meeting where staff warned that unresolved Workday payroll issues could undercut a labor agreement designed to avert layoffs and that short-term technical fixes are underway.

The committee heard that, as of Aug. 28, 349 positions were in “substitute authority” slated for elimination; 279 of those positions are being held in abeyance because of tentative agreements with bargaining units, and 70 layoffs were actively being processed by the Personnel Department. Kimberly Squire of the Chief Administrative Office described the headcount and said negotiations with the coalition of unions are “pending” and that a tentative agreement could reduce the number of layoffs in advance.

Why this matters: the Police Protective League’s tentative agreement includes a voluntary overtime bank that city officials say will generate savings used to prevent layoffs across other departments. That arrangement cannot operate reliably until Workday consistently applies a specialized pay calculation known in the meeting as the “171‑hour” FLSA rule for sworn LAPD personnel.

Payroll union leader Matt Garza, director with the Los Angeles Police Protective League, told the committee in public comment that members have “out of patience” with Workday and urged the city to seek damages from the vendor, citing a recent Oregon judgment in which the state won money from its Workday vendor. Garza said Workday’s failures are “negatively impacting the city's budget” and the voluntary overtime bank that was “designed to save money and save jobs.”

Information and technical steps described at the meeting:
- Personnel Department (Vince Cordero) said phase notifications and layoff calculations are paused for some employees while tentative agreements are finalized; a set of phase 3 notifications were put on hold pending an agreement that staff hopes will be finalized by Friday, Sept. 19. One phase 4 layoff proceeded because that employee was not represented by the coalition.
- Steve Rivera (Personnel) said the expedited transfer process (ETP) had produced 136 conditional job offers, of which 89 were accepted, 45 were declined, 2 were pending, and 67 accepted offers had been completed in Workday. The transfer portal currently shows about 424 positions available and departments have been referred more than 9,300 applications and have received more than 1,700 applications in total. Rivera said ETP will remain active for the rest of the fiscal year regardless of the bargaining outcomes.
- ITA General Manager Ted Ross and Ed Magos summarized the technical problem: integrations from subsidiary timekeeping systems into Workday can produce data that fails Workday validations, and in a subset of cases that triggers negative balances or rejected time that payroll staff must correct manually. Ed Magos said, “The 171 FLSA rule has been configured in Workday since go live,” and described edge cases and rejected records that require manual resolution.
- Workday agreed to bring back an original deployment specialist for an approximately eight‑week period at no cost to the city to review and reconfigure the 171 logic; meeting participants said Workday will also provide a deployment specialist for roughly 50–60 hours to assist on integrations. Officials characterized this work as urgent and prioritized it to unblock the voluntary overtime bank.

Staffing and capacity constraints were emphasized. ITA staff said the project had 11 external consultants during the first year of implementation and that funding fell to three consultants in the second year, creating a smaller sustained capacity to clear a backlog. ITA reported receiving 800–1,000 Workday tickets per month and said teams are triaging critical tickets first. Committee members urged setting concrete deadlines and increasing resources.

Fire and police both described subsidiary timekeeping complications. LAPD CFO Trina Anziger said LAPD has documented issues (“snow tickets”) related to the 171 calculation and is working closely with the controller, personnel and ITA. Fire Department staff described parallel integration work and said two vendor “bake‑off” demonstrations for alternative timekeeping/tracking systems were scheduled in the next two to three weeks to test options that might replace or better integrate with Workday.

Controller’s office participation and oversight: controller staff said the issue is a high priority and that senior controller leadership, payroll, and integration leads are participating in the remediation work.

Committee action and next steps: after discussion, the chair recommended the committee hold item 16 in committee rather than advancing the motion to full council. Staff were asked to return with monthly updates and to include the controller and other departments as appropriate. The committee did not vote to advance the Workday motion at this meeting.

Ending: committee members said they would monitor completion of the consultant work and the configuration fixes and asked staff to return with follow‑up reports showing progress toward implementing the voluntary overtime bank and reducing the number of positions in substitute authority.