Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out how little the city pays emergency medical technicians — and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get them a raise. We’ll also look at why some people are skipping salads.
An emergency medical technician in New York City has a high-pressure, high-drama job, and it doesn’t 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 — and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get them a raise.
What stopped everyone who read your article was that some paramedics are paid as little as $18 an hour. That’s $2 above the minimum wage in New York City.
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.
E.M.T.s and paramedics work for the Fire Department. Why the disparities between what firefighters are paid and what paramedics are paid?
It’s one of those quirks of how city government works — 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.
The disparities in pay have never been resolved. It’s an issue that every mayor knows is a problem but never seems to get around to tackling.
There’s turnover at E.M.S. How many E.M.S. workers leave in a year? Where do they go?
The city and the unions representing E.M.S. workers are in agreement that turnover is a problem for the E.M.S. force.
It’s gotten particularly acute in the last few years. The union expects 900 people to leave the force this year.
E.M.S. workers can “promote up” 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.
So E.M.T.s who like their intense, demanding jobs can’t live on what the city pays them.
That’s 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.
But she says she has little choice but to seek another job with higher pay. She made about $56,000 last year — but only took home $1,500 or so every two weeks, and that was only because she worked so much overtime. “Tons and tons” of overtime was how she put it.
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.
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?
I don’t 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.
If the E.M.S. workers get a significant raise, can the city afford similar increases when contracts for other city workers come up?
E.M.S. workers’ poor pay — they’re among the lowest paid of all of the city’s hundreds of thousands of employees — 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.
What’s especially complicated for the mayor is that the city’s labor contracts are dictated by collective bargaining, where one union typically sets a “pattern” for wage increases for the other unions. The city is not in fantastic shape financially, and there’s 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.
Weather
Look for a high near 88 and more patchy smoke from Canadian wildfires. Tonight will be partly cloudy with temperatures around 73.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Tisha B’Av).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Stay somewhere cool with air-conditioning, limit your time outdoors, drink plenty of water and check on your neighbors.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on coping with the smoke from wildfires in Canada that has been working its way southeast.
The latest Metro news
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Denouncing conditions at Delaney Hall: Members of Congress are calling for an overhaul at the facility in Newark after health inspection reports, court filings and other public records pointed to a pattern of problems since the Trump administration began using it as an immigrant detention center.
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More trains at Penn Station: A federal study found that Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan could schedule more trains per hour with track-level improvements for passengers to board or detrain faster.
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House Republican discloses a drunk-driving arrest: Representative Mike Lawler, who is facing a tough re-election fight in his Hudson Valley district, said that he had been arrested on St. Patrick’s Day 2012, when he was the executive director of the New York State Republican Party.
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Republican ads take aim at Mamdani: The campaign, which accuses Democrats of abandoning Israel and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of fostering antisemitism, seeks to persuade Jewish voters to switch parties.
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A hectic month of soccer: Roger Bennett, a soccer fanatic, left his home in June to start a World Cup odyssey that will end at the final game at New York New Jersey Stadium on Sunday. By then, he will have logged more miles than most of the teams.
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Jeffery C. Mays substitutes for Sam and talks with two Times data reporters about using census data to map ancestries across 250 years of U.S. immigration policy. The program airs on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Suddenly squeamish about salads
In the last few days, smoke from wildfires in Canada has drifted our way, making the sky hazy. It’s been hot, too.
A Legionnaires’ 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.
And a parasitic infection has had some salad eaters skipping their usual greens.
The infection, cyclosporiasis, is a diarrheal illness that can also cause stomach cramps and nausea, as well as muscle aches, low-grade fevers and tiredness, according to the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It says there have been more than 374 cases in the city since May 1, more than usual, with 30 reported last week.
The infection can’t be spread from person to person. The health department says you can become infected by eating food contaminated with the parasite. In Michigan, where a serious outbreak is in progress, officials said the illness might be tied to salad.
That has some customers at salad chains thinking twice about what they order. But others said they had been hardened by past public health threats. Enrique Correa, an engineer who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said that the Covid pandemic had skewed his perspective on health risks. Having survived that, he didn’t hesitate to eat a Sweetgreen salad for lunch.
“I’m living on the edge,” he said with a shrug.
METROPOLITAN diary
Matter of degrees
Dear Diary:
The doors opened one afternoon on the 1 train, and Kevin Bacon stepped on. Actual Kevin Bacon. “Footloose” Kevin Bacon. “A Few Good Men” Kevin Bacon.
I watched as, one by one, everyone on the train looked up from their book or their phone, registered that he was there and then silently went back to their book or their phone.
Except for one person: a young, college-age guy at the end of the train, who said under his breath, “That’s Kevin Bacon.”
Then he said, a little louder, “That’s Kevin Bacon.”
Then he stood up and started marching straight toward Kyra Sedgwick’s husband. As he did, he said again, “That’s Kevin Bacon!”
The woman next to me locked eyes with him.
“We know,” she said quietly. “Sit down.”
The young man stopped in his tracks, paused for a moment and then sheepishly returned to his seat.
The 1 train rolled silently along. Kevin Bacon was safe. And everyone who had witnessed that event was now one degree from Kevin Bacon.
— Jenny Hagel
Ms. Hagel is a writer and performer for “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Paramedics’ Push for a Living Wage appeared first on New York Times.
