Good morning. It\u2019s Friday. Today we\u2019ll find out how little the city pays emergency medical technicians \u2014 and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get them a raise. We\u2019ll also look at why some people are skipping salads.<\/p>\n
An emergency medical technician in New York City has a high-pressure, high-drama job, and it doesn\u2019t pay much. Now, as the city negotiates a new contract for Emergency Medical Service workers, I talked with Eliza Shapiro, a Metro reporter who covers the affordability crisis and wrote about how E.M.T.s get by \u2014 and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get them a raise.<\/p>\n
What stopped everyone who read your article was that some paramedics are paid as little as $18 an hour<\/a>. That\u2019s $2 above the minimum wage in New York City.<\/p>\n Yes. I have been writing about New York City government since I was a teenager, and even so, I was shocked by how little so many E.M.S. workers are paid.<\/p>\n E.M.T.s and paramedics work for the Fire Department. Why the disparities between what firefighters are paid and what paramedics are paid?<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of those quirks of how city government works \u2014 E.M.S. merged with the Fire Department in the 1990s, but some people describe it as a marriage that never really took. Firefighters can make about double what many E.M.S. workers top out at.<\/p>\n The disparities in pay have never been resolved. It\u2019s an issue that every mayor knows is a problem but never seems to get around to tackling.<\/p>\n There\u2019s turnover at E.M.S. How many E.M.S. workers leave in a year? Where do they go?<\/p>\n The city and the unions representing E.M.S. workers are in agreement that turnover is a problem for the E.M.S. force.<\/p>\n It\u2019s gotten particularly acute in the last few years. The union expects 900 people to leave the force this year.<\/p>\n E.M.S. workers can \u201cpromote up\u201d to become firefighters with better pay and benefits. Some leave the city payroll for private ambulance services or join public ambulance services on Long Island or upstate, where the pay tends to be better.<\/p>\n So E.M.T.s who like their intense, demanding jobs can\u2019t live on what the city pays them.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right. Take Taysha Soto, an E.M.T. I spoke with at length. She is a 29-year-old single mother of two who grew up in New York and wanted to become an E.M.T. after she watched her mother die of lung cancer and felt helpless to do anything.<\/p>\n But she says she has little choice but to seek another job with higher pay. She made about $56,000 last year \u2014 but only took home $1,500 or so every two weeks, and that was only because she worked so much overtime. \u201cTons and tons\u201d of overtime was how she put it.<\/p>\n The trouble is that the more she works, the more she has to pay her babysitter, who sometimes works from 6:30 in the morning until 11 at night.<\/p>\n It now takes longer for ambulances to arrive than it used to. With so much turnover at E.M.S., are staffing problems the reason that ambulance response times have gone up in the last 10 years?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think we can say that attrition is the reason that ambulance response times have been going up for the last decade or so. But the city acknowledged that staffing is one of a constellation of problems: There are fewer ambulances on the street and more medical emergencies now than in the past.<\/p>\n If the E.M.S. workers get a significant raise, can the city afford similar increases when contracts for other city workers come up?<\/p>\n E.M.S. workers\u2019 poor pay \u2014 they\u2019re among the lowest paid of all of the city\u2019s hundreds of thousands of employees \u2014 presents a real quandary for Mamdani. Remember, this is the mayor who said he is going to make the city more affordable for working people, and presumably that will include some of the employees whose wages he helps set.<\/p>\n What\u2019s especially complicated for the mayor is that the city\u2019s labor contracts are dictated by collective bargaining, where one union typically sets a \u201cpattern\u201d for wage increases for the other unions. The city is not in fantastic shape financially, and there\u2019s no way to get all city employees a raise in one fell swoop. That has left some people pushing the mayor to get E.M.S. workers out of the collective bargaining process.<\/p>\n Weather<\/p>\n Look for a high near 88 and more patchy smoke from Canadian wildfires. Tonight will be partly cloudy with temperatures around 73.<\/p>\n ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING<\/p>\n In effect until Thursday (Tisha B\u2019Av).<\/p>\n QUOTE OF THE DAY<\/p>\n \u201cStay somewhere cool with air-conditioning, limit your time outdoors, drink plenty of water and check on your neighbors.\u201d \u2014 Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on coping with the smoke from wildfires in Canada that has been working its way southeast.<\/a><\/p>\n The latest Metro news<\/p>\n Suddenly squeamish about salads<\/p>\n In the last few days, smoke from wildfires in Canada has drifted our way, making the sky hazy. It\u2019s been hot, too.<\/p>\n A Legionnaires\u2019 disease cluster on the Upper East Side has sent 13 people to hospitals and left more than 50 others sick. More than 50 buildings have scrambled to clean their air-conditioning systems after testing positive for the bacteria that causes the illness, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art.<\/p>\n