By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Emergency Medical Technician Manny Ramos had promised his 8- and 10-year-old daughters that he’d take them to a Chuck E. Cheese arcade and restaurant after he got home from work.

But then the order came down: Ramos was mandated to do an overtime shift right after his regular tour.

“Here I had to call my daughters and say ‘Daddy’s not coming home,’” said Ramos, a delegate in EMS Employees Local 2507. “Kids just don’t understand it when you promise to do something and then tell them you can’t. It was terrible.”

Thanks to a January decision on overtime by the city Office of Collective Bargaining, EMS workers facing situations like that of Ramos will hopefully no longer have to keep performing an impossible juggling act with their families and jobs.

Ruling in favor of Local 2507 on an improper practice charge, OCB threw out a much-hated overtime policy that wreaked havoc on the lives of Local 2507 members and endangered the public.

More humane policy
Besides allowing members with family or educational commitments to turn down overtime assignments as long as a coworker is available, scrapping the policy should expand overtime opportunities for members who want to put in extra hours.

“You will never end all mandatory overtime,” said Local 2507 President Patrick J. Bahnken. “But this victory goes a long way toward making the assignment of overtime a lot more humane.”

The battle dates from 1997, when Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided to reduce the overtime cap to 25 percent of base salary. He also instituted an overtime “equalization” practice. This aimed to distribute overtime on a rigidly equal basis without considering seniority or personal concerns.

Before EMS was moved from the Health and Hospitals Corp. to the Fire Department in 1996, EMS workers could earn up to 50 percent above their base salary in overtime. The change ended a more family-friendly policy that generally permitted Local 2507 members to decide whether to do overtime.

The new policy destroyed families, made workers put in 16-hour days, aggravated job-related stress, led to dozens of disciplinary cases and forced many members to get a second job to make up for lost overtime pay. It also jeopardized public safety by requiring sleep-deprived ambulance workers to remain at work.

Union fights back
The policy particularly hurt single parents. In one absurd case, EMT Margaret Holeman was reported to the city Administration for Children’s Services because she was forced to leave her five children unsupervised when she was suddenly ordered to work overtime. The case was thrown out, but the incident left Ms. Holeman with a bitter feeling.

At first, Local 2507 hoped to resolve the issue through negotiations. It has also fought back with numerous grievances and vigorously defended members brought up on disciplinary charges for allegedly refusing overtime.

On Aug. 25, 1999, several hundred members of Local 2507 and EMS Captains and Lieutenants Local 3621 demonstrated against the policy. The improper practice victory will also bring relief to the EMS officers, though they were not as severely affected by the stringent overtime policy as Paramedics and Emergency Medical Technicians.

In addition to canceling the overtime policy adopted in 1997, OCB — an impartial agency that settles many labor-management disputes — ordered the Fire Dept. to negotiate with the union about any new changes. The union hopes the ruling will help resolve 40 related disciplinary and grievance cases, said attorney Leonard A. Shrier, who handled the improper practice proceeding.

“The long-term solution to excessive overtime is for the department to hire more workers,” said Stephanie Velez, director of the DC 37 Professional Division.

“But in the meantime, we will be working aggressively to get the overtime-related problems behind us through discussions with management.”