A little background- I, as most career firefighters do, work for a governmental body. Think waging 20 year wars, and MASSIVE corporate bail outs. That type of government. I am part of a fire house in the mid west, and I work with, and for, some really good people. We work a 48hr on and 48hr off schedule. The industry standard is a 24hr on 48hr off schedule this is set by our policy makers at “HR” out east in D.C. this basic difference means we work about 18% more hours than the industry standard, and the government saves a TON on benefits by only hiring 2 shifts of firefighters instead of 3 like most other departments.
This was just the “way things are” until January of last year. The “Chief Executive” issued an executive order to raise the federal civilian employee (civilian government employees, non military etc) minimum wage to $15 per hr. This would have brought my entry level firefighters up almost $4 per hr, which is good and necessary because our pay is laughable considering we literally spend half our working lives at work (48hr on/48hr off).
HR was given 6 months to figure out the particulars and implement the policy. Most were done fairly quickly, but since we work such crazy schedules compared to the normal 40 hrs per week, they took the full 6 months to figure out the firefighters. In June they told us that we weren't going to get the raise because we work too many hours, and the current annual income is commensurate with an entry level employee. (Only when compared to 40 hr employees, again its laughable within the industry)
To top it all off, we are exempt from holiday pay, shift differentials, and the overtime we work (as part of our regular schedule, not even talking about forced OT) is not used in our pension calculation.
I'm the union president, and I've been fighting this for years now. It's infinitely frustrating. Just venting, thanks for reading if you made it this far.