chicago firemen make $85000 on average (Oak Park, Glen Ellyn: power lines, insurance, lawyers)

[smallvillejane]

I knew they made good living, but 85k on average? I was surprised to learn that!

[NorCal Dude]

Fear the union, there are cities out west that are going bankrupt due to all the costs incurred in operating a city. 80% of which goes to the cost of having police and fire. (google vallejo, ca)Everytime I have chirped the idea of a volunteer fire department in community meetings out here I get met with anger and down right hostility. Which is odd, the vulunteer fire department worked fine when I was growing up in Glen Ellyn. Plenty of good citizens willing to fight fires, perform cpr, and get cats out of trees for free. Big cities of course are a different dynamic, and you do need 'professionals', how ever i suspect a good deal of fat could be skimmed with some volunteer replacement as well as reduction of pay at the higher ranks. Some of these guys retire and live like kings, better than some professors and lawyers even.

[chirack]

The trouble with averages is you don't know how it is calculated. I think that is a good pay for them. Lawyers are not expected to literarly pull your posterior out of a fire. Not counting the fact that they live at the fire house so many days a week. They are on call in a way that most people are not.

With a unionized job, it can be a few senior people earning all the overtime while everyone else earns less. I used to work at a place where one guy was pulling $100,000 a year while everyone else was making considerably less. He was a bit more senior and worked overtime like crazy.

[Brahern02]

I have a fireman friend who makes a little under 70K a year, so that average sounds a bit skewed. All that aside, I don't know if I would want to be a cop/firefighter in Chicago for that much. It seems to be a good paying job, but after seeing and hearing about some of these fires, I don't know if I would do it for under 100. The danger is very high, not to mention the mental trauma that is caused. How would you feel about pulling a dead child from a fire, I know that would be something that would stay with me forever. Just my 2 cents.

[linicx]

Speaking of, everytime I read 'fireman and child' in the same sentence I think of the photo that may have been on TIME magazine of the fireman carrying the toddler in his arms after the Oklahoma City bombing. Oklahoma City Bombing - FamousPicturesMagazine

[chet everett]

The top heavy structure is what makes it look like a great paying situation. The younger guys make MUCH less than that and from what I have seen do the tougher jobs too. It is pretty much impossible to get hired at all if you do not have EMT/paramedic training / certification. If you do have that designation you are not going to sit around the fire house, you are running dozens of calls a night in pretty much every Chicago firehouse. Most of the calls are just a waste -- routine fender bender where some body looking for insurance money wants to go to hospital for whiplash. Bus hits and pot hole and somebody bumps their head. Crazy / old person wants a ride to hospital. Some body gets dizzy at work. Then there are things that sorta emergencies but not exactly rescues -- people in nursing home don't have DNR and the staff is worried that the family will sue if the recessitated patient doesn't get the ride to the hospital. Chronic diabetic goes into a coma and nobody has a regular physician. Somebody with high blood pressure doesn't know the different kinds of stroke symptoms. Not really "saving lifes" like on TV. Way down at the bottom of list in most parts of the city there are traumatic injuries -- car crashes, fire related, violence. With much fewer folks in the high density projects the EMTs are spending more time driving to get to the scatterd sites, which translate into more danger of some idiot not paying attention to the sirens and lights. And then there is the chance that the violence "re erupts".

Young guys at the bottom of the food chain are making a little more than half that $85K and it is basically impossible to live on that in Chicago. That means they need to take contract work in another town to afford to anything better than flea bag rent, which basically means that even with 24 on 48 off they are still working 6+ days a week, but the time in the 'burbs is when they sleep and catch their breath...

I have two cousins doing this, one was able to move into a great slot in Oak Park and he lives in the SW 'burbs, his older brother is finding it a lot harder to move up in Chicago and he is frankly getting frustrated that even the kind of women that go for fire fighters ain't the same as it was in the old days. He is no longer the youngest kid in the station and he very frustrated that the older guys don't want to retire and allow him room for promotion. The collective bargaining worked really well for guys in the late 40s on up, but it is creating a mess for the city finanances and even hurting moral for the younger guys -- without a relative to pull you up the younger guys see no way to have a family and afford to live in Chicago...

[MannheimMadman]

Even if this was not a "supply and demand" sort of thing, I think the compensation is in relation to danger.

It's just like those guys who work on on telephone poles or power lines. I'm sure the work isn't rocket science, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to be suspended a hundred feet in the air playing with thousands of volts of electricity. There is a reason that pays an OK wage; not many people would like doing that.

[Irishtom29]

Originally Posted by NorCal Dude

Some of these guys retire and live like kings, better than some professors and lawyers even.

Why not? One can reasonably argue that firemen are at least as useful to society as professors and lawyers.

[coldwine]

I'm alright with firemen pulling in $85k a year. It's a very difficult job few would choose to do, so market conditions indicate at least that much should be payed.

Also, I'm willing to bet that benefits are necessary for years of public service in a job that can ruin you physically. I'm sure arthritis is the least of a retired fireman's concerns.

[JoeyPants]

Very few people are willing to run into a burning building to save complete strangers. 85k is not outrageous for risking your life on a regular basis.