New York City paramedics have been through it. “I woke up this morning to about 60 new text messages from paramedics who are barely holding it together,” Anthony Almojera, a lieutenant paramedic, told The Washington Post last month. “Some are still sick with the virus. At one point we had 25 percent of EMTs in the city out sick. Others are living in their cars so they don’t risk bringing it home to their families.” Five had died; others were still on ventilators.
But it’s not just a hard job made exponentially harder by a pandemic. “One thing this pandemic has made clear to me is that our country has become a joke in terms of how it disregards working people and poor people,” Almojera said. “The rampant inequality. The racism. Mistakes were made at the very top in terms of how we prepared for this virus, and we paid down here at the bottom.” That’s not just about the coronavirus, though.
In early April, The New York Times’ Mara Gay wrote about the massive inequality in how the city treats its first responders, with paramedics and EMTs getting screwed.
“Firefighters receive a base pay of about $85,000 after five years on the job, compared to about $65,000 for paramedics and $50,000 for E.M.T.s.,” she wrote. Oh, and by the way? “The firefighting force is three-quarters white and about 99 percent male; more than half of E.M.S. workers are minorities, and more than a quarter are women, according to city data.”
That couldn’t possibly make a difference in their pay levels, now could it? And it’s not just about the danger levels of the jobs. “I’ve been shot at on this job. I’ve been beaten and cursed at,” Almojera told the Post. Never mind the danger of contagious diseases from treating sick people in emergency conditions.
The New York City Council has called for pay equity, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has opposed the idea in the past, and he dumped cold water on it again in April. It’s time for the life-and-death importance of these first responders to be recognized with the pay they deserve—and other first responders get.