GREENWOOD, Miss. (AP) - Employees of a city in the Mississippi Delta will not receive COVID-19 hazard pay because their contracts don’t specify they can receive extra money for dangerous conditions.
Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams said she had sought opinions from the offices of the state auditor and the state attorney general on whether the employees would be eligible for hazard pay. She was told they were not because the contracts lacked hazard-pay clauses, the Greenwood Commonwealth reported.
The mayor also said she was told that the city couldn’t insert hazard-pay clauses after the fact to make the employees eligible.
“Our employees worked hard during COVID, but other people worked hard as well,” McAdams said. “If there had been a way to have legally done that, I’m pretty sure the city would have done that.”
According to the mayor, Greenwood’s biggest expenses this year pertaining to COVID-19 have included overtime for city employees, particularly for police officers working to enforce COVID-19 social restrictions as well as the city’s curfew when it was in place during the summer.
Another large COVID-19 expense for the city has been not docking employees for sick days if they had to quarantine at home because of COVID-19. Rather than deducting pay, McAdams said, the city just absorbed the cost.
Greenwood received about $365,000 in coronavirus relief funds that were allocated by Congress and sent to the state.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.