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A 13-year veteran of the New York City Emergency Medical Services called for a pay rise on Thursday, a day after the group boycotted Mayor Bill de Blasio’s TTY parade for the City’s “Hometown Heroes”. coronavirus pandemic.
“Giving us a parade only highlights how much we need to raise,” Paramedic Liana Espinal told “Fox & Friends”. “We need more money. The thanks, praise and parade are nice, but it just doesn’t put food on the table and don’t allow us to take care of our families.”
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The base pay for paramedics in New York City is only $ 16.95 an hour, less than $ 2 more than the legal minimum of $ 15 an hour.
“Show us on pay, not with the parade,” Espinal repeated after co-host Brian Kilmeade. “Let us be able to take care of our families without having to work 80 hours a week… You can’t take care of your family and not be there for them because you have to be at work so much.”
Last year, EMS workers responded to the most medical emergency calls in the city since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At the height of the pandemic in March 2020, nearly a quarter of the workforce was on sick leave.
“We have seen more deaths than ever before,” Espinal said. “It was very stressful mentally, emotionally and physically for us.”
Local 2507, the union that stands up for emergency medical workers, called spending millions of dollars on a parade while treating emergency workers as “indentured servants” “the pinnacle of hypocrisy ”.
“As far as the leaders of this city are concerned, the treatment of this workforce is an absolute disgrace,” union president Oren Barzilay told the New York Post last month.
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De Blasio pushed back the salary increase for FDNY EMT last April as the pandemic gripped the city.
“Now is not the time, you know, to invent something on the fly in the middle of a crisis,” de Blasio said. “It’s just the truth. We’ll find out when we go through this crisis.”
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