Another Knife in the Hearts of FDNY EMS Personnel

This essay isn't about the large group of hardworking NYC Department of Education paraprofessionals who assist classroom teachers, enrich the lives of NYC pupils of differing physical and mental abilities, and help them to thrive.  

This is about a stop-gap measure taken to shore up the paychecks of some essential workers.   It illustrates the very different way that NYC has dealt with another, much smaller group of workers, the men and women of the FDNY Emergency Medical Services (EMS).  Every year, FDNY EMTs and paramedics treat hundreds of thousands ill and injured New Yorkers, transport them to area hospitals and re-start hundreds of hearts that had stopped beating. 

 A tale of two cities 

Earlier this month, in a veto proof vote of 49-0, the NYC Council passed a $244,000,000, "workforce stabilization measure" to supplement by $10,000 the income of each of the 25,000 NYC Department of Education paraprofessionals.   

 With their approval of the "Respect Check," the NYC Council took action to address the low pay, and the resulting shortage of Department of Education's paraprofessionals before their current labor contract even expires in 2027.  For the lowest paid paraprofessionals, the Council's "stabilization" measure will amount to about a 30 percent bonus. 

Given their shorter work week and their shorter work year, at a current $33,098 per year, Department of Education paraprofessionals earn slightly more per hour than both newly hired FDNY Emergency Medical Specialist Trainees and certified EMTs who have been working without a raise for 4 years, and for whom the Council has never passed any such helping measure. 

Through numerous hearings, the Council has been well-informed, for a long time, about the continual staff shortages and the inadequate pay of this other group of essential workers, the roughly 4,000 Emergency Medical Services personnel who staff the FDNY's ambulances.  In contrast to its treatment of the Department of Education paraprofessionals, for years the NYC Council has made only verbal attempts at improving the abysmal pay of these medical first responders even in the face of climbing ambulance response times to life-threatening medical emergencies. 

Until now, the Council has defended this course of action by saying that FDNY EMS pay is up to collective bargaining controlled by the mayor and his Office of Labor Relations.  

The FDNY EMS is short staffed, but not for lack of recruiting new workers.  In the past five years, it has hired and trained approximately 2,000 new EMTs, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. 

Despite that, the size of FDNY EMS workforce is at best, stagnant, and less and less able to quickly answer the more than half a million, yearly 911 calls for life threatening medical emergencies.  That's because members of the EMS regularly leave for higher paying jobs.  About 70 percent of them quit in under five years, mainly because of the pay. 

The old barb that EMTs and paramedics don't deserve to be paid on a par with the city's other first responders was laid to rest in 2021, when the U.S. Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission issued its official determination that: "Workloads, working conditions, training and risks to EMS First Responders and Firefighters are comparable, with a substantial degree of overlapping duties, especially with respect to medical emergencies... the evidence further shows the two groups have comparable accountability and responsibility... any difference in duties between the EMS First Responders and Firefighters fails to explain the pronounced gap in wages and benefits...  "Investigation further determined that [the City] improperly treated and compensated EMS First Responders as civilians, when they are uniformed personnel.”  

Is the FDNY EMS close to paying for itself?  

The city's treatment of the FDNY Emergency Medical Services is all the more vexing because, according to published reports, the FDNY EMS, in carrying out its medical mission, typically brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to NYC annually.  As of July 1, the minimum charge for an ambulance trip to the hospital rose to $1,793.00, up from $900 in 2021. 

For Fiscal Year 2025, the latest year for which the information is publicly available, the Mayor's Management Report noted that there were 1,001,801 "medical emergencies resulting in ambulance transports."  As a probable result, for the same 2025 year, a NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation financial statement, on the NYC Comptroller's website, documented that FDNY EMS ambulance work had accrued over $500 million dollars for NYC. 

Meanwhile, the city's current FDNY EMS budget which includes EMS staff salaries, fringe benefits, overtime, equipment, supplies, materials, etc. is $417 million dollars. 

In the City Council's response to last year's FDNY budget, it wrote: "Addressing pay disparities is critical to stabilizing the EMS workforce." However, unlike for the Department of Education paraprofessionals, the Council didn't feel it necessary to legislate any financial measures then, or since, to address the staffing problems in the FDNY Emergency Medical Service. 

A united front before the mayor's Office of Labor Relations?  

In June, at separate Council hearings on the current FY2027 NYC budget, FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore, the council members who were present and the leadership of the two FDNY EMS union locals 2507 and 3621, units of District Council 37, were all on the same page about the need for FDNY EMS pay parity.  

Facts have disproven District Council 37's press release about the last FDNY EMS contract of 2021, that it would "improve recruitment and retention." The question now is whether or not. -- in the current FDNY EMS contract negotiations -- DC 37 officials can be as politically savvy and fight as hard for the FDNY EMS workforce, as the UFT does for its paraprofessionals. 

Will they insist that the city's labor negotiators follow the 2001 law granting FDNY EMS "uniformed service" status in bargaining?  Will the mayor's Office of Labor Relations (OLR) change its long-running tune, defending the enormous pay gap among first responders, EMTs, paramedics, and firefighters in the FDNY?  Or, will it be business as usual for OLR, DC 37, the FDNY EMS and for New Yorkers who need an ambulance in a hurry when they might be dying? 

Last month, the city-wide average ambulance response time to life threatening medical emergencies climbed to over 15 minutes, or four minutes (36 percent) more than the same month, ten years ago. It's a stark picture of a workforce that's in desperate need of "stabilization".