What is the true value of a life in New York City? According to City Hall, it’s just above
minimum wage, but certainly less than $20.
About $18.94 per hour is about all our city leaders are willing to pay Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) to serve as our “Street Doctors,” faithfully protecting city residents no matter how harrowing the circumstances. For someone with such a high level of medical training and experience to be paid that low seems kind of absurd.
Every single day, my colleagues and I are out there saving lives. We are the members of the busiest Emergency Medical Service (EMS) responder agency on the planet, yet we are forced to survive on poverty wages.
Is this how we are supposed to treat our role models in society, and even perhaps heroes, who are focused on saving life each day?
Since COVID struck in 2020, the number of New York City resident medical emergencies has risen sharply with each passing year. We are doing more critical work than ever, for pay we can barely live on.
Last year, New York City’s brave EMTs and paramedics responded to a record 1,630,446 medical emergencies across the five boroughs — yes: more than a million and a half incidents. That is a 15.4% increase since the peak of the pandemic. It also represents 86% of the nearly 1.9 million total emergencies responded to by the entire FDNY.
There really must be something wrong here with a city government leadership that is so blind or insensitive to New Yorkers’ real need for quality FDNY EMS protections. Yet the salaries of this mostly female and minority workforce are dwarfed by fellow first responders with whom they work shoulder to shoulder.
NYPD officers’ starting salary is $60,884, a figure that rises quickly to $126,410. Firefighters begin at $54,122, which rises to $109,532 after five and a half years. FDNY EMTs, who start at just under $19 per hour, make less than $40,000 a year, with everyone topping out at $59,534 after five years of serving on the mean streets of New York City. That compensation is less than half of what our great police officers and firefighters get, who rightfully deserve proper compensation for their dangerous and difficult jobs.
However, elected leaders must recognize FDNY EMS as the critical lifesaving asset that it is. Our members respond continually to life-threatening strokes, cardiac events, stabbings, shootings, serious mental health episodes, drug overdoses, unknown virus outbreaks, and chemical, radiological, biological, or nuclear scares, all which endanger themselves in the process.
The EMS mosaic is representative of our diverse city population, but it seems to fly in the face of the department’s recruiting pitch and politicos hailing diversity initiatives while they hypocritically underpay those on their own payroll. The mistreatment of these medical first responders has resulted in a toxic 70% brain drain, with most members quitting during the first few years on this extremely tough and dangerous job.
That continuous outflow of skilled medical staff would hurt any hospital or medical practice and certainly harms the ability of the EMS to protect the citizens of each borough. The impact of disinvestment in the FDNY EMS is illustrated in the latest Mayor’s Management Report, which shows response times to life-threatening medical emergencies were 11 minutes and 21 seconds in fiscal year 2025, up 1 minute 47 seconds over the last four years.
Think about it: If it’s your loved one suffering a heart attack or stroke, those 11 minutes until an ambulance arrives — not at your door but instead outside the building where the emergency is taking place — take forever. When life is on the line, every second counts.
Politicians proclaim they want the FDNY to be more diverse and reflective of the city’s population, yet they condone this horrific treatment of the most diverse portion of the agency.
The last Brooklyn borough president said that if elected mayor, he would make it a priority to create wage equity for the EMS with police and fire. Since taking office and enjoying its power and prestige, Mayor Eric Adams has offered us only verbal compliments. Message to City Hall: Your workforce can’t buy groceries or pay rent with hollow words.
The members of FDNY EMS Local 2507 have attempted for years now to achieve a fair contract. The mayor’s spokesperson always says they are “in negotiations,” but even if you repeat an untruth 100 times, it’s still a lie. There is no good faith at all in City Hall.
Despite it all, the 4,300 members of the FDNY EMS continue to save lives throughout this great city that is far too expensive for us to live in. Some of our members live in homeless shelters or cars, until they can’t take it any longer, and just quit.
City leaders should be ashamed.
Shakeria M. Thomas is a 13-year veteran of the FDNY, serving as an EMT and, for the past three years, as a member of the department’s specialized Mental Health Response Division.