Yesterday's posting here about the L.A. Daily News story - "L.A. Fire Department overtime pay going through the roof," by Jason Kandel, Staff Writer- http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_12175241 -on the high cost of LAFD overtime has stirred up a lot of opinions. There is now a statement, "Overtime Issues," issued by the Executive Board of Local 112 of the firefighters union, the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City. You can see that on their website, http://www.uflac.org/index.cfm?section=1
The response takes the position that the Daily News story is an inflammatory one that was purposely printed to work against the firefighters union in their contract negotiations. It also states that the overtime conditions are created by the employer and not any fault of the employees. In the end, the urging is to hire more firefighters so that the current firefighters will have better work schedules and home lives.
There still has not been any union rep coming on the radio so far. KABC-AM 790 morning host Doug McIntyre has invited Pat McOsker, President of Local 112 speak on the topic, and so far there's been no response. The author of the story Jason Kandel, Staff Writer for the Daily News, was a guest this morning and described how the story originated and how the public records request was made for the underlying data. The numbers that came out were what make this story so surprising. I don't think that accusations by the union aren't valid. Trying to somehow work against the firefighters in their contract negotiations is not the point of the story, as the findings themselves are both newsworthy as showing some management styles that appear as costly approaces to personnel management, and secondly, the costs are entirley borne by the taxpayer. All this is when we have a city budget that is deeply in the red, making all expenses important to consider and "high" expenses deserving of special attention.
A Fire Commission member was interviewed on KABC radio this morning and did not have specific explanations for the showing made by the news story. He asked that they be given a few weeks to examine the situation before anyone criticizes the overtime conditions. It does seem that as a commission, they should have been on top of this in the first place and have information available to answer questions now. It looks like the were not aware of the condition and that it was news to them, too. Asking to hold criticism until they have a response is not a reasonable request.
Some explanation offered have shown that the job description of an employee vacancy on a shift requires that the substitution under overtime conditions calls for using an employee with the same "job classification" - for example, certain employees handle driving trucks and others handle other tasks, so the same class of employee is required if it's the ladder truck driver spot vacant on a shift, and that is who can do overtime for that vacancy and so on. That's an explanation for some of the OT going to certain persons more than others, but there still has been a big increase in OT and one employee has made a half million dollars of OT in three years, and that does not seem to be saving money. Some cross-training sounds like it might help but unions tend to resist changes.
Training, pension, and other costs for each new hire are what is said to be saved by using overtime. Still, you would seem to have a lot of tired firefighers from time to time, and a bigger work force might get you more man(woman)power in cases where lots are needed at the same time, like wild fires, and having a fresh workforce sounds like a benefit all around. There's a lot of interpretations to this, but the idea that OTHER cities don't have the same situations in OVERTIME has to make you wonder what is going on. And there's really no one in their right mind operating against firefighters, who do a necessary and worthy service for the public.
More to come from the various sources. We definitely will see what develops and what kind of solutions, if any can be found, will be called for.
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