The union that represents more than 2,000 Philadelphia firefighters and paramedics says that its members will, for the first time in two decades, receive a wage increase lower than police officers did — a contract provision they see as the end of years of pay parity among the city’s first responders.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration announced Wednesday that a panel of arbitrators had issued a two-year contract award for Local 22 of the International Association of Fire Fighters after its members had gone more than a year without a contract.
Local 22 is the last of the city’s four major municipal unions to reach a multiyear agreement with the Parker administration. The other unions agreed to their contracts last year.
Parker said in a statement that the contract award recognizes the contributions of the city’s firefighters and emergency medical personnel “while supporting the city’s efforts to remain fiscally responsible.”
The contract award was issued by a three-member arbitration panel, a process governed under state law because emergency workers do not have the right to strike. The deal includes 3% raises annually for the next two years, plus a 1% wage increase in recognition of mandatory physical evaluations that members must receive biannually.
Those raises total a 7% pay increase over two years for union firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical personnel. In the city’s contract with police inked about a year ago, members of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 received a 9% wage increase in total over the same time period, plus a $3,000 signing bonus.
Local 22 President Mike Bresnan said Parker’s administration did not adequately advocate for pay parity between police and firefighters. He said that he is lobbying members of City Council to consider legislation that would require Council approval for the mayor to appeal firefighters’ contracts in the future.
“Mayor Parker likes to run around putting her one index finger up as ‘we’re all one,’” Bresnan said. “Well she just put her middle finger up to every firefighter and paramedic in the city.”
He added: “If there’s somebody out there that’s thinking about running for mayor, we’d like to have a conversation with them.”
The firefighters’ union has historically played a relatively minimal role in city elections compared to more politically active labor groups like those that represent construction workers. The union did not back a candidate in the 2023 mayor’s race that Parker won.
The FOP contract, similar to the firefighters’, included 3% annual raises. The difference was that police received an additional 1.5% annual wage increase because their union agreed to a process called “civilianization,” meaning some roles held by uniformed officers would be transitioned to ones held by civilians.
The raise, according to the contract, was in recognition of the “operational flexibility” that the civilianization process would achieve. It did not identify the number of positions that would be civilianized or if the effort would save the city money.
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The arbitration panel that drafted the firefighters’ contract is made up of one appointee each from the city and the union, plus a neutral arbitrator. That panel wrote that while there has, in general, been pay parity in raises for police and firefighters, that “has never meant identical awards.”
In this case, the panel reasoned, the civilianization-related raise was unique to the police department and the city did not need to match it for the firefighters.
Marc Gelman, the union’s appointed arbitrator, issued a scathing dissent, writing that the contract award was ultimately a “rubber-stamp to the city’s desired economic wishlist” and provided firefighters with “a dramatically lower wage increase than the police.”
He argued that the city could afford a higher wage increase for firefighters because it is operating from a place of fiscal strength, citing its substantial surplus in this year’s budget.
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However, the city will have to tap into reserves or make adjustments to its existing five-year budget plan to cover the firefighters’ contract. That’s because the administration already exhausted its $550 million labor reserve to cover contracts with the city’s other major municipal unions.
The Parker administration did not estimate how much money the firefighters’ contract award will cost.
Gelman wrote that the labor reserve was exhausted through the city’s “mismanagement and inability to plan.”
“The city now cries poor,” he wrote, “and expects the members of Local 22 to suffer for its ineptitude.”
Bresnan said pay parity is a critical because the police and firefighters’ unions are unique in that “members can leave for work in the morning and not come home at night to their family.”
“We’re out there shoulder-to-shoulder on these emergencies in the city,” he said. “Every mayor prior recognized this and kept the peace. Now they’ve created a fracture between the first responders in the city.”