A first responder double standard: EMTs on food stamps

One of New York City’s long-standing inequities has reached a sickening point: Full-time medical first responders are so underpaid that many now qualify for food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers.

Year after year, City Hall has failed to keep its promise to raise wages for increasingly strained FDNY EMS workers, stuck at the poverty wage of $18.94 per hour.

Understaffed EMTs are no longer just the city’s lowest paid first responders. They are one of the lowest-paid city employees across all sectors, even as New York’s medical emergencies have soared every year since 2003, up nearly 50 percent.

EMS workers’ starting wage is less than New York’s app-based restaurant delivery workers, who now make at least $19.56 per hour before tips, following much celebrated legislation from City Hall in 2023.

It is profoundly hypocritical for our government to dictate private industry’s wage disparities while ignoring their own.

Uniformed FDNY EMS members stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our brave police and firefighters responding to the most dangerous 911 calls, disasters and crime scenes unfolding across our city on a daily basis. Yet despite years of pleas and City Hall’s gestures toward pay equity, EMS are paid significantly less than their peer first responders.

In his campaign three years ago, Adams pledged to bring FDNY EMS wages into line with our great police and fire departments. “They need more than a hand clap at 7:00 p.m. They need pay equity,” Adams said.

Three years later, demoralized EMS members continue to call it quits as Adams’ commitment hangs in the wind. Did he truly mean what he said on the record?

FDNY EMS loses on average 50 percent of its EMTs within five years. With regional cost of living spiking and their poverty wages stagnating, they leave in droves for other cities or take jobs with private companies, where they can make $20,000 or $30,000 more per year. It’s a costly brain drain that harms public safety.

An FDNY paramedic has the equivalent medical training of a hospital ICU nurse, who makes roughly $140,000 per year, about the same as the top salary of a Nassau County police paramedic. Yet those with over 20 years of experience working for the greatest medical first responder agency in the world somehow make only about half of that wage.  

This untenable injustice is fast depleting our city’s emergency response system.

Intensifying threats to EMTs on the job led to recent legislation requiring the FDNY to provide bulletproof vests to all of its EMS staff, as well as self-defense training every three years. There were 214 attacks on FDNY EMTs in 2023, a 20 percent increase from 2022.

Every day EMTs are spit on and punched by mentally unstable patients in the throes of severely traumatic episodes. Consistent staff shortages force EMS workers to enter drug dens and crime scenes without adequate backup.

On September 29, 2022, an EMS lieutenant was stabbed to death while on duty in Astoria, and seven years ago a Bronx EMT was murdered after a bystander ran her over with her own ambulance.

Why sign up for a job like that knowing the guy zipping by to fulfill a Happy Meal delivery makes a higher wage?

In 2023, FDNY EMTs and paramedics responded to a record-setting 1,619,863 medical emergencies, the vast majority of the Fire Department’s overall dispatches. With only a third of the current year remaining, 2024 emergency data is signaling another record-breaker for New York’s “street doctors.”

We are past the point of being stretched thin. FDNY EMS workers put their health and safety on the line every day treating the city’s sick and seriously injured.

These indispensable workers are not arguing for compensation greater than police officers or firefighters, but they are calling for more equitable pay that better reflects the nature of their work.

Simply put, being an FDNY EMS worker shouldn’t put our families on the welfare rolls.

Oren Barzilay is the president of FDNY EMS Local 2507 representing the FDNY’s EMTs, paramedics and fire protection inspectors.