Employees in West Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles regional offices in Charleston and Martinsburg will soon receive extra pay for working evenings and Saturdays - as soon as the state's wvOasis computer can be programmed to accommodate the change, a DMV spokeswoman said Monday.
Natalie Holcomb said testing is under way to make sure the payroll portion of wvOasis is programmed to correctly apply the shift-differential pay for about 50 employees at the two regional offices.
"We're in kind of a holding pattern," she said, "just waiting for that testing to be done."
The state Personnel Board last week approved the DMV's request for $5 an hour shift-differential pay for employees working Saturdays at the two offices, as well as for those working weekday evenings after 5:30 p.m. at the Charleston office, in Kanawha City.
Linda Ellis, DMV regional office operations director, said the pay differential is an attempt to reduce high turnover at the two regional offices, where employees regularly transfer to other DMV offices or to other government jobs, to have a more stable 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday workweek.
"We're hoping to get people who want to work Saturdays and work evenings for the extra money," she said of the pay differential.
The Charleston office is open until 6 p.m. weekdays, and the two regional offices are open from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, with a rotating schedule where employees work three out of four Saturdays a month.
Employees frequently have to work past the posted closing hours, since drivers who come in at or close to the offices' posted closing time are not turned away, Ellis said.
She said hiring additional workers to reduce the number of Saturday shifts employees would have to work isn't feasible.
"We would love to have more staff," Ellis said. "Unfortunately, that's not an option. We can't keep the positions we have filled."
Reach Phil Kabler at philk@wvgazettemail.com, 304 348-1220, or follow @PhilKabler on Twitter.