Letter in the
I
felt the fire department did a nice job presenting their side of the story
[Response to Bruce Philpott New Model] on Tuesday. It
made me realize that their 24 hour shifts and 4 people on a fire engine aren't
the big issue, it's the way they go about it. The expensive part of their
business is the staffing for people that are not there. To let more than half
of a scheduled workforce take a day off and have to backfill each and every one
is absurd. Why are so many allowed to be gone the same day? At my place we
don't allow more than just a few workers off on any one day. It would put me
out of business to do otherwise. This Carte Blanche leave policy is terribly
costly. And I guess these firemen don't even have to ask a supervisor when they
want the time off, it's at each fireman's own whim and a computer automatically
hires a buddy on overtime. What other business allows that? To make this worse,
the firemen get something like 270 hours of vacation. That's way more hours
than any other position in the city if you look at their contracts (they're on
the web site). And it's not just the firemen working 24 hours that get this
generous gift of time; it's all of the fire staff people too. So, a fireman
working a 40 hour office job gets 7 weeks of paid vacation on the public's
dime, plus their holiday banks, plus other things like management days that add
up to months of time away. I wish I was so lucky - my people get 3 weeks tops!
And while these people are off vacationing, their positions are backfilled on
overtime, elevating yet another dedicated civil servant on the $100 thousand
list (or is that $200 thousand now?). Oh, and not only do the office workers
get all that vacation, they get that bonus percentage (I've heard 10%, 11% and
13% mentioned) for having to suffer through a work week that is far shorter
than the average working stiff. No wonder you have worker bee fire managers
making over $200 thousand if you‘re paying them overtime and bonus percentages like
this! To pay someone a premium to have them work a "normal" work week
allowing them to be with their families at night sounds crazy to me. I still
like your idea of staffing the fire stations with fewer people at night when
they don't need so many people getting paid to sleep. That would really cut
down on their overtime. And why can't a fireman of some type be an acting boss
when their supervisor takes a day off? Instead they hire back managers and
supervisors on overtime. I use senior employees in my business. It develops
them and doesn't waste money on high wage earners who shouldn't get overtime in
the first place. There are lots of people out there who would love to have
these benefit riddled police and fire jobs and do them for a lot less money I am
sure. Didn't they all sign up to help people? As a businessman who is
frustrated with government cost overruns and whose business is suffering badly
in this economy, these overly generous perks make me ill. The tail is wagging
the Dalmatian here folks. FF