As cities and counties grapple with budget cuts and public employee unions jockey to retain pay and benefits, one group of workers has repeatedly found itself in the eye of the storm: firefighters. News reports from around the nation have drawn attention to the high salaries of some firefighters, mostly as a result of generous overtime and sick-leave policies. The Orange County (Calif.) Fire Authority paid out $28 million in overtime in 2008, a 55 percent increase since 2003, according to a recent report in the Orange County Register. In 2008, the median pay for an Orange County firefighter was nearly $138,000, of which $36,000 was overtime.
At the Los Angeles Fire Department, which serves more than 4 million people who live and work in the city, overtime pay rose by 60 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Daily News. In 2008, more than 50 firefighters earned $100,000-plus in overtime pay alone—with one bringing in more than a half million dollars in overtime over three years.
And in Clark County, Nev., budget woes and the threat of layoffs have pitted the firefighters union against some elected officials and members of the community. In 2009, Clark County firefighters earned an average of $187,000 in total compensation, including benefits and overtime pay, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The dispute in the Las Vegas area heated up after a county compensation study found firefighters called in sick twice as often as other county employees and at four times the rate of management. Some members of the community claimed firefighters purposefully called in sick to allow other firefighters to claim the higher overtime pay. In fiscal 2009, firefighters averaged about 91/2 days of sick shifts, or about one month of sick leave a year.
Such reports have left some members of the public with the feeling that firefighters either don’t work that hard—how could they work so much overtime if it wasn’t a fairly easy job most of the time?—or they are “gaming” the system at taxpayer expense.
“I get a lot of whistle-blower calls about firefighters,” says Marcia Fritz, president of the Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a public pension-reform group based in Sacramento. “The whistle-blowers say firefighters literally agree among themselves who will work and who will call in sick. I can see budgeting for overtime in an emergency or unusual situations. But there’s no good reason to be paying overtime routinely.”
Firefighters, however, see things differently—though even some quietly admit there can be, in individual cases, abuses. A typical schedule for a firefighter is to work 10 24-hour shifts per month. That means firefighters are actually on the job about 56 hours a week—substantially more than the typical 40-hour work week—making hourly pay lower than it might appear at first, says Gary Ludwig, deputy fire chief in Memphis, Tenn., and chair of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Emergency Medical Services Section.
Add to that the inherent physical dangers, and “I believe the job that we do, the effort we put out and the sacrifices we make is worth the compensation that our firefighters receive,” he says. “During tough economic times, it’s easy to pick on people who have a job or are perceived as getting something others think they aren’t getting.”
In addition, in many cases it’s actually cheaper to pay OT than to hire, train and pay not just the salary but the pension and benefits for new workers, Ludwig adds. A rule of thumb is that if the cost of hiring and the benefits package exceed 50 percent of pay, it costs less to pay time and a half to existing workers. (Memphis pays relatively little in overtime; out of an annual budget of about $162 million, approximately $3 million goes to overtime.) “When we crunched the numbers, we found it was cheaper to hire new employees than to pay overtime,” he says.
Keeping open communication between the fire chief and the city or county manager is critical, Ludwig says. And if municipalities want to stop paying overtime, they can do so by hiring new workers. Minimum standards dictate how many firefighters have to be on each engine in order to operate. “Our staffing is not discretionary,” Ludwig says.
