Chief Leader – March 17, 2015
by SARAH DORSEY
Hundreds of firefighters in blue t-shirts crowded onto the steps of City Hall March 16 to protest the reduced disability benefits provided to police and firefighters hired from 2010 onward if they must resign due to on-the-job injury.
Those benefits add up to about $27 a day for a rookie Firefighter.
Put Onus on Council
They carried signs that read “…Just don’t get hurt” and “City Council doesn’t care,” and several spoke about their fears for their families if they were injured.
Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy was flanked by more than a dozen elected officials, including Public Advocate Letitia James, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and City Council Members. The Council has introduced a resolution that would require a hearing on a home-rule message to allow state legislators to take remedial action giving them the same disability rights as more-senior cops and firefighters.
A Drive to Persuade
The press conference kicked off a campaign that Mr. Cassidy hopes will convince Council Members, Mayor de Blasio and elected officials in Albany to give his newest members a stronger safety net when they get seriously hurt.
The UFA has been speaking with city and state elected officials as well as editorial boards at major news outlets, Mr. Cassidy said. The union this week debuted a series of radio and television advertisements to run on NY1 and other major stations. They feature mostly black and Latino firefighters who are worried that they’ll go broke if they’re injured to the point where they can’t return to work.
The discrepancy has its roots in 2009, when then-Gov. David Paterson vetoed a Tier 2 extender bill that the State Legislature had passed routinely since 1976, when most new hires were placed under what has since become Tier 4 of the state retirement system. It would have allowed new fire and police hires who were injured on the job to be covered under Tier 2, which provides tax-free disability pensions worth 75 percent of the final average salary.
Cops and firefighters hired from 2010 forward receive just 50 percent of final salary minus half of any Social Security disability payments under the Tier 3 system to which they were assigned. The benefit is also subject to state and city taxes.
When Mr. Paterson issued his veto, the Fire Department was under a hiring freeze tied to a Federal hiring-discrimination suit. But since then, about 1,400 new Firefighters have been sworn in.
‘Second-Class Citizens’
Mr. Cassidy noted that the FDNY has finally begun hiring blacks and Latinos in much higher numbers; about 46 percent of those Firefighters are people of color.
“Now that they’re hiring the diversity that they want, that so many in the Council, the Mayor and the Speaker lobbied for, they’re treating them like second-class citizens,” the union president said in an interview last week.
The advertisements feature a dozen firefighters, each sitting before a plain background and speaking directly into the camera. The mostly-young men and women talk in simple terms about the risks they’ve agreed to take on, and their fears about the consequences for themselves and their families—or future families—if they’re unlucky.
“We’re taking the same risks; we’re all putting our lives on the line,” one said.
Another recited the common ways that firefighters get hurt. “Falling off a ladder, falling off a building, being involved in a collapse,” he said.
Attractive Benefits?
One young man, speaking about the excellent benefits he was promised, said, “That was a big part of me making a commitment to become a Firefighter.”
Mr. Cassidy, and his allies in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, hope to convince the Council to issue a home-rule message that would allow the State Legislature to make the change.
Mr. de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito last year opposed the fix as too expensive, citing then-City Actuary Robert C. North Jr.’s estimate that it would cost $35 million in Fiscal Year 2015 alone.
The UFA president called Mr. North’s projections “flat-out false” and his methodology “flat-out insulting.” The actuary, who noted in an interview with this newspaper shortly before he retired last October that his estimate constituted a “worst-case scenario,” took disability costs from the last decade and projected them into the future. Mr. Cassidy said that was misleading because it includes injuries and illnesses incurred on Sept. 11.
More Costly If They Stay?
He predicted that some injured Firefighters would take desk jobs rather than retiring, saddling the city with a new class of Firefighters it must pay for light-duty work for two decades. Mr. North shared that view, saying the Tier 2 disability provision should be adopted to allow cops and firefighters unable to return to full duty to “retire with dignity.”
“I would argue that because the disability benefit is so low that if a new Firefighter is permanently disabled, they won’t retire. They can’t retire,” the UFA leader said.
Asked about his lobbying in Albany, Mr. Cassidy said, “We’ve talked to everybody who’s got something to do with it. I won’t say we talked to the Governor directly, but this is being discussed by the leadership in Albany.” He added that he believed the money could be found as part of the Governor’s budget, so the unions wouldn’t need a home-rule message, but Mr. Cuomo hasn’t indicated he would be amenable.
The Vulcan Society of Black Firefighters and the FDNY Hispanic Society are helping Mr. Cassidy with his push, which he said attracted more than twice as many young Firefighters eager to help him make the video than he could use.
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