Houston Firefighters Fight to Pay Voters
Houston Firefighters Fight to Pay Voters
Houston firefighters who have been in a tough battle with the city for higher wages are taking their case to the voters.
Firefighters in the nation's fourth-largest city are asking for pay parity with local police in a proposal in which the mayor of Houston insists it would be "a financial disaster for the city."
Houston residents will vote on the plan for the city's 4,000 firefighters on November 6.
The firefighters union says its members have had only a 3 percent pay increase since 2011 and that they are poorly paid compared to the Houston police and other fire departments across the country. Houston police officers got a 7 percent pay raise earlier this month.
Mayor Sylvester Turner says he respects firefighters, but that the proposal would cost too much. The city estimates the initial cost up to $ 100 million. Turner says city services would have to be cut and hundreds of city workers, including first responders, would lose their jobs.
Marty Lancton, president of the Association of Firefighters Professional Firefighters of Houston, believes that Turner's dire financial warnings are a "false budget crisis". Lancton has questioned the changes in the figures that the city has used to calculate the price, but did not offer its own cost calculation.
Lancton said some firefighters have to work two or three jobs to support their families.
"When you do not equally value the service and sacrifice of firefighters as you do with police officers, you do not make public safety the number one priority," Lancton said.
The plan requires that firefighters and police officers of similar rank or status be paid equally. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States, the concept is as old as the two professions, but wage parity has been eroding steadily since the 1950s. Several large cities in the US As Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York, they still have wage parity between firefighters and police officers.
According to the data of the International Association of Firemen, the initial salary of a fireman in Houston is of $ 40,170; in Phoenix it costs $ 48,526; in Chicago it costs $ 56,304; and in Los Angeles it is $ 72,704.
Among the largest cities in Texas, Austin, Fort Worth and San Antonio, all have higher initial firefighter salaries. Last month, Dallas increased the initial salary of its firefighters to $ 60,000.
In Houston, a firefighter apprentice's salary is $ 28,024, while the salary of a police cadet is $ 42,000. After graduating from the police academy, the salary rises to almost $ 50,000.
The battle for payment follows a bitter struggle for pension reform, led by Turner, to reduce the city's huge pension debt. In the middle of the ongoing tension, two firefighters last year rejected Turner by not shaking hands with public events.
After the most recent contract negotiations failed, Houston firefighters filed a petition with the city in July 2017 to include the salary parity measure on the ballot. The firefighters accused the Turner administration of slowly walking the process of verifying the petition and preventing it from being validated in time for November 2017. choice. Later they filed a lawsuit to obtain the measure on this year's ballot.
Turner, who campaigned against the referendum at city meetings and on social media, says firefighters would need a 29 percent pay raise to align them with police officers.
"I love firefighters, I respect what they do," Turner said at a public meeting on Tuesday. "But the city can not afford to give any group of employees anything like a salary increase of 29 percent."
Turner said that between 2005 and 2010, firefighters received increases totaling about 34 percent. He says the city has offered a 9.5 percent pay raise that is still on the table.
Those against the measure include local business groups, Democratic and Republican officials, and unions representing police officers and municipal workers, he said.
Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at the University of Houston, believes that the ballot measure has a good chance of being approved because of the "positive opinion that most people have of first responders, especially firefighters."
While both sides still have incentives to find an equitable solution to the wage dispute, the "poisoned" relationship between the two sides could ultimately make it too difficult to achieve, Rottinghaus said.
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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter at www.twitter.com/juanlozano70
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