By Jim Mauro
Thunder Bay – OPINION – Have you seen the billboards around town that outline the hourly rates for police and fire in comparison to what paramedics get paid. The gap is approximately $22,000 per year and they want as much money as police. Please tell me that their union is kidding.
EMS have five crews that work 24 hours a day, meaning ten paramedics available as a minimum. Throughout the day, they have another 6 crews (22 total on shift) that work a 12-hour shift with start times that range from 7am-3pm. Like the police at 3am, they could be down to ten paramedics to respond to medical emergencies, but they average about 8 crews for most of the day, almost always more than police.
Sometimes these workers are simply doing patient transfers. Those transfers are handled by the crews on the road. So, you either have a crew in the middle of a transfer that is unavailable, or they are dealing with an emergency and the transport is delayed.
These patient transfers are not always seamless. Off-loading is common, meaning they may have to wait until the facility is free to accept the transfer or wait until the hospital can take the patient. That can be hours, but it does sounds like an easy gig if you are just sitting around waiting.
Police have been dealing with the huge drug problem in the city, along with the many mental health/addiction challenges that exist. Sounds to me like that’s worse than sitting around waiting for a patient to be admitted. In fairness though, these types of calls are also handled by EMS crews. Highly intoxicated people, or people with other addiction and mental health challenges do not just hate the police. Sometimes they focus their anger on EMS workers. Whatever, that’s the job they signed up for, isn’t it?
Being assaulted, spit at, or having to take drug cocktails for being contaminated by blood or saliva is also part of their job. Their union believes that these working conditions should warrant consideration of their pay scale. When these individuals lash out, EMS workers also bear the result.
Nurses in certain areas, also have this violence problem. It is why the hospital was paying two officers, 12 hours each to keep control in the emergency ward. A necessary but terrible waste of limited health care dollars. Why is this necessary?
Well, it really is no secret, but no one in power will say it nor has anyone shown one ounce of gumption in dealing with it. The consequence of this reality has become more common for our EMS workers. To the best of my knowledge, this violence against EMS staff or nurses rarely leads to charges. Is anyone outraged by that?
This increasing violence has also led the EMS union to request police body armour. Is anyone wondering when it became necessary for these workers to have to worry about being stabbed or shot? How did management respond to this request?
One response was “what if you are shot in the face”. Sounds like they watched a police drama for that nugget of wisdom. Another stated that they “don’t want Thunder Bay to be the first city to issue these, it would set a bad precedent”. Why worry about the safety of our EMS workers when what the rest of the province may think is more important.
But finally, management said they would buy the vests but only if the EMS workers themselves paid for it through payroll deduction. I don’t recall that requirement for police, and I would be shocked if fire is required to pay for their equipment. Well, EMS is the ugly stepsister, so this is not a surprise. Currently, no EMS worker is wearing body armour.
There have been times in this city where only two units are available for emergency response. One bad traffic accident away from having no one to respond to your heart attack. Is this a factor when debating EMS pay levels? Police pay for their training when they attend police college, so what about our EMS workers. I am glad you asked.
EMS workers must have a two-year college program, fully paid by the student, not the taxpayer who pays fire for their training and police a wage while attending police college. So, these individuals are taking cash out of their pocket to save your life. One more year of schooling to become a higher trained paramedic that enables the employee to issue some drugs and perform additional life saving procedures.
The province wants to change that program to three years and four. This is being fought by the heads of EMS in Ontario because it would make it harder to fill the approximately 500 vacancies that currently exist. Like police, there is not a stampede of people to this career. Anyone wondering why?
They are also required to do additional training each year, often at home due to staff shortages. I would suspect this does not happen to police and fire. And retention can be a problem in this profession with many of their employees leaving for greener pastures. At the risk of repeating myself, is anyone asking why?
You might assume that the physical requirements are different. Well, that is a reasonable assertion, except the EMS job routinely requires heavy lifting and injuries are common. Should these factors be considered when discussing wage increases in line with the other two more public brethren?
When you just look at call volumes per the three emergency agencies within this city, should the number of calls for service be a factor in determining how many workers per profession should be on shift or what the pay scale should be? Response times are important, and that leads me to ask why minimum response times do not exist for heart attacks or gun calls? Shutting down an EMS location to save $25,000 as this council did, seems a rather questionable process in delivering priority services that could save someone’s life.
These are choices made by City Council and the electorate. But when a cop is not available, or EMS is late getting there, you can be sure people will scream at the individual who responds, not the group that designed and funded these resources. This has been on-going for decades, and Council has the power to correct what can be described as questionable planning.
EMS workers are exhausted, hurting and facing staff shortages, a problem becoming more acute. Would a higher pay scale change that? It would help, but it leaves the other serious problems of understaffing, workload and the physical wear and tear that comes with being an EMS worker. Why go into that career when other medical fields will likely be far less physically demanding for more pay.
Our increasing societal problems have EMS workers on the front line of these challenges. Our funding for the services this city provides, usually comes from our municipal tax base but we are now dealing with regional challenges. Why is that? Where are our elected federal and provincial official while this is taking place? These issues fall at their level, yet they have been downloaded onto our city. But back to the EMS workers.
If the city provided an eight dollar an hour increase to these workers, it would cost approximately 1.2 million dollars. It would still leave our EMS workers behind police and fire, but it would be a step forward in rectifying an injustice that has existed for far too long. This is before the anticipated wage increases for police/fire happen in this contract year.
But there is one issue that benefits the taxpayer, only one half of this increase would be absorbed by the taxpayer, the other half would be funded by the province. So, even if it was a 1.2 million dollar increase to their budget, the overall cost to the local taxpayer would only be 600 thousand.
This city has never had a problem saying that wages for non-union workers need to be competitive to attract the top people. Are they willing to use this tired old argument to keep workers in some of the other position’s our city needs? In my view there are certainly sound arguments for equality of pay.
I asked the question in the title, “are they joking” because some might believe that a politician sitting around the council table is going to push for this to take place. Well, don’t hold your breath.
What is likely to happen is these workers will be forced to go to arbitration, an arbitrator, not wanting to go too far outside the box will only address the disparity a little if at all. And should these workers get the same percentage increase as police and fire will receive, the pay gap will only get worse. They deserve better.
If you don’t agree, then I have failed in making you see how unfair this is. If you agree, then do these workers a favour and pick up the phone or write an email to your members of council and tell them to get this done.
Our city just committed 42 million dollars to an indoor turf facility with some of the same people who voted against this project three years ago because of cost, now having no problem paying more. Well, how about finding the money to pay these workers what they deserve.
I do not care about what “precedence” may be set across the province. How about this argument. We live in an isolated area where it is sometimes difficult to attract or keep top notch talent to fill the roles this community needs. We have heard that same argument used repeatedly to justify wage levels and increases for management staff so how about using the same argument to pay some of your workers and ensure they remain here.
These are the people getting spit and bled on while dealing with people that routinely are beyond filthy, perhaps have defecated themselves and are suffering from mental health or addiction problems. They are not sitting comfortably in an office telling these workers how there is not enough money to pay them, but always enough to pay the management staff.
I believe the billboards were a brilliant display to let the public know just how much of a disparity exists between the three levels of emergency response. It is long past time to rectify this situation. And if all of this didn’t convince you, how about this. Without disparaging the work dispatchers do, the people responding to your heart attack, or traffic accident are currently making less per hour than the dispatchers sending them to these calls. Does that make sense to anyone?
Given the desire for many to leave this profession, when you call for help for that heart attack you are having, no one may respond. We have seen it happen with police and emergency calls. No one listened when I predicted a shortage of people applying to be police officers twenty years ago. It is now a North America wide problem.
So don’t be surprised when it happens to EMS as well because I have seen three postings about base closings around the Thunder Bay district due to staff shortages, the area our EMS workers are responsible for. While this situation is not surprising it is disturbing and addressing the huge wage disparity may assist in dealing with a problem that is showing that it is only going to get worse if it is not dealt with in a meaningful way. Just a thought.
Have an idea for a story or wish to comment on this one? I can be reached at maurojustathought@gmail.com. Comments/ideas will always remain confidential
