The tangled history of why NYC EMTs’ pay still falls far short of firefighter salaries
In April 2021, Eric Adams accepted the mayoral endorsement of the city’s largest municipal union, District Council 37, and made a pledge that if elected, by his first day on the job he would give the union’s Emergency Medical Technicians — who provide medical care to stabilize patients and then transport them to New York City hospitals — salary parity with firefighters.
Four years later, not only has he failed to deliver, but the pay gap between the two Fire Department forces has widened. EMTs, who start service at $39,386, reach a top pay after five years of $59,534. Firefighters start at $54,122, and while they spend five-and-a-half years on the job before climbing the top step on the pay ladder, max out at $105,146. (The pay scale is higher for the higher level of EMTs who receive nine months of paramedic training and handle advanced life support cases, where those at the entry level provide basic life support. Firefighters undergo 18 weeks of training at the Fire Academy while new EMTs get from 13 to 18 weeks of instruction. There are 4,500 EMTs and officers, compared to 11,000-plus firefighters and officers.)
The salary gap has grown increasingly glaring since 9/11, as EMS medical responses have dramatically increased while structural fires have continued their steady decline over the past half-century, from 56,127 in 1975 to about 24,000 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024. During that fiscal year, the FDNY reported 1,862,151 EMS runs — triple the 619,378 fire-suppression responses.
The disparity has grown partly because of the pattern bargaining used by City Hall to control labor costs. It also doesn’t help that, in contrast to firefighters, EMTs are working under a contract that expired in 2022 because their unions were so displeased by the city’s pay offer in this round of bargaining.
And in an extra twist of the knife, EMTs have been forced to accept the same raises as the rest of DC 37’s 100,000-plus members under what is known as the civilian bargaining pattern. In contrast, firefighters, along with police and correction officers, generally receive slightly higher raises under what is called the uniformed pattern.
The New York City Council tried to provide some relief by passing a law in 2001 that granted EMS uniformed status, which opened the door for its employees to receive the uniformed pattern. But after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office the following year, he made clear he would not allow the Council to encroach on his bargaining prerogatives, and neither he nor his successors have negotiated contracts that recognize that law.
EMTs, who start service at $39,386, max out at $59,534. Firefighters max out at $105,146.
There have been occasions when unique circumstances have led to contracts that provide raises exceeding the established bargaining patterns, mostly for city teachers, including a couple early in Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure.
Such circumstances exist for the EMTs, for whom one union official put the turnover rate at 50% during their first five years on the job. As Daily News columnist (and Vital City contributing writer) Harry Siegel wrote in March, EMS constantly loses experienced employees to the firefighter ranks because those employees get preference in hiring from civil-service lists, and even the most dedicated medical workers find it hard to ignore that pay difference. EMS union presidents for decades have railed against the comparatively low pay for their members, and the rank and file has sometimes voted for new leaders because the incumbents were unable to significantly bridge the gap.
There are two primary reasons this huge discrepancy persists, illogical as it may seem when examining the duties of the two services. One is that while there are advantages to being part of DC 37, which represents city workers in titles ranging from accountant to zookeeper, EMTs and their officers total just less than 5% of that contingent. Any raises above the norm for them would not only come at the expense of the rest of the union’s members, but would cut into the pie for cops, firefighters, teachers and the rest of the city workforce.
The other reason is that the distorted pay picture vis-à-vis EMTs has its roots in bargaining relationships established 60 years ago, when meaningful negotiating rights were implemented under a city law and solidified as part of the state Taylor Law. At the time, EMS was part of the city hospital system and standards for EMTs weren’t nearly as rigorous as for cops and firefighters. As a result, no thought was given to linking their salaries to those groups, as had been done for correction officers and sanitation workers.
EMS was moved into the Fire Department midway through Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s first term in 1996. Structural fires in the city had already declined significantly from the point in the 1970s when poorer neighborhoods were wracked by arson commissioned by unscrupulous landlords looking to recoup investments on decaying buildings. During a fiscal crunch in the early 1990s, Mayor David Dinkins ordered the closing of some firehouses, arguing that fewer were needed to deal with fire volume at that point. (Bloomberg in 2003 closed six firehouses to save money.)
Giuliani, who used to speak fondly about his uncles who were firefighters, looked to restore fire service but also wanted firefighters to plug shortages left by rapid turnover in EMS by taking on some medical duties. He negotiated a deal with then-firefighter-union president Tom Von Essen that paid his members $1,400 more annually to take on that work, but that wasn’t enough to quiet the grumbling of some firefighters that this wasn’t what they had signed on to do.
Later in the decade, when Von Essen took the unprecedented step of moving from union leader to fire commissioner, he argued that making the transition could solve two problems. The added duties, he told a reporter, were a safeguard against some future mayor seeking to close firehouses due to a decline in activity. And the clamor from EMS union leaders claiming that their members were being treated as what one called “the red-headed stepchild[ren]” of the FDNY could be stilled, Von Essen said, if future hiring was for a hybrid title of Firefighter/EMT. Those recruits would be trained in both firefighting duties and medical ones and would all be placed on the existing pay scale for firefighters.
(Such a hybrid is now used in other cities around the U.S., most notably in Washington State, where the two jobs are combined and those holding them in Seattle and Tacoma are paid more than NYC EMTs.)
The practicality behind Von Essen’s suggestion was no match, however, for the protests fire-union leaders made to Giuliani, and the idea was quietly discarded 25 years ago. Even as some old-line firefighters continued to regard medical duties as an infringement on their real work, some fire chiefs and union officials came to see the preference given to EMTs who passed special promotion exams for firefighter as an opportunity. More than a few of their sons used that route to move quickly from riding in ambulances to jumping on fire engines.
The salary gap has grown increasingly glaring since 9/11, as EMS medical responses have dramatically increased while structural fires have continued their steady decline.
One irony in the early months of the pandemic stemmed from the concern that firefighters who contracted the coronavirus could infect entire companies who shared quarters in their firehouses. This led to the force long known as “New York’s Bravest” having its medical runs sharply curtailed, meaning EMTs treating those with the virus were the employees facing by far the greater risk of catching the virus. Union officials at the time said some of their members were sleeping on ambulance-station couches or in their cars to avoid infecting their families.
Even after the pandemic subsided, EMS runs continued to rise. They have increased by half a million annually this century, and rose by 15% since the pandemic, according to one union official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
(Neither EMS Local 2507 President Oren Barzilay nor EMS Officers Local 3621 President Vincent Variale returned phone calls seeking comments on the pay situation, but in March, Barzilay sought to discourage New Yorkers from seeking EMT jobs with the FDNY, stating the city treated his members like “second-class citizens.”
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom the EMS unions endorsed for mayor last month, said at the time, “We will give these heroes the resources they’ve earned so that the city may recruit the talent and retain the experience NYC needs.” Conspicuously absent from that statement was a promise of pay parity with firefighters.
With Von Essen’s plan to provide a fairer wage for those who focus their careers on medical duties now a distant memory, the best chance for the EMS unions to break loose from the bargaining patterns to which they are chained seems to be to take their case to arbitration.
But that route has obstacles, too: such proceedings can be expensive, and it’s not clear that DC 37 would want to pay that price while taking heat from its large non-EMS membership who might feel that the money was being spent to benefit EMS workers at their own expense.
Danny Burstein, who served as Local 2507 treasurer in the mid-1980s, said that while he couldn’t guess at the current dynamic between DC 37 and its two EMS locals, “The District Council loves pattern bargaining and used to do its best to keep us from breaking out of that.”
Arbitrators generally are not inclined to radically rework longstanding bargaining relationships. In one case more than a decade ago, a small union representing environmental police officers who patrolled the city’s watershed areas showed that its members in the wake of 9/11 had taken on anti-terrorism training that placed them on an equal plane with city cops. The arbitrator, Al Viani, gave them a percentage raise matching what the city PBA had won in its latest round of bargaining, but declined to raise overall salaries for the watershed cops to match those of NYPD officers. He explained in his decision that the higher pay for city cops had been achieved over decades of negotiations, and stated that the environmental officers should not make up all that ground in a single arbitration award.
It was a blunt reminder of the limitations of collective bargaining in overcoming a longtime financial injustice. So far, that reality has prevailed despite the fact that the historical failure to pay EMTs a fair salary for their work has created an obvious problem for the city that employs them.
But one former DC 37 official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, thought an arbitration might begin to chip away at the salary gap with firefighters. “They probably have a legitimate beef,” he said of the EMS unions. “And the worst that could happen is they’d still get the civilian pattern. What have they got to lose?”