Chicago Firefighters Remain in Contract Battle with City

When rank-and-file firefighters joined them to demand a contract last month, the Chicago Teachers Union framed the team-up in powerful terms: “Two unions. One fight.”

Now, with a pending deal for teachers clinched last week, only one of them remains in the ring.

Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2 is rounding out the fourth year of its battle for a new collective bargaining agreement. Unlike their counterparts in school classrooms, the first responders have gone without the vocal support of Mayor Brandon Johnson throughout their relatively drama-free standoff.

But behind the scenes, sources from both sides of the bargaining table described an impasse in negotiations that has them hurtling toward arbitration. By state law, police officers and firefighters cannot strike.

Local 2 President Pat Cleary said the long wait flies in the face of a mayoral campaign questionnaire statement Johnson gave him in which the then-candidate pledged “No union should go a day without a contract.”

“If he were pro-labor, I would have a contract,” Cleary said.

How Johnson maneuvers through the political and fiscal dilemma of landing the deal will prove fateful to not just his self-claimed brand as “obviously the most pro-worker mayor in the country,” but also to how a Fire Department with an aging fleet and old-school deployment model will operate in modern times.

In a statement, Johnson’s press office did not address specific questions about the contract “out of respect for the collective bargaining process” but said the mayor “fully supports the hardworking men and women” of the department.

A CTU spokesperson did not respond when asked how the teachers union would continue to support the firefighters union.

While Johnson has yet to reach a contract, he has quietly given Local 2 one major allowance by dropping a sure-to-be-ugly worker reorganization fight his predecessor stood poised to start.

A third-party study commissioned by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration recommended the Chicago Fire Department drop its standard of manning five firefighters per engine to just four. The 2022 report from the firm Fitch & Associates, obtained by the Tribune, concluded that doing so would free up personnel and money to add more ambulances as the city contends with fewer fires and more medical emergency calls.

A source familiar with the Fitch report said the study was supposed to give Lightfoot ammunition to pursue the politically uphill crusade of realigning CFD staff, long a third rail at City Hall, by making the case that lives were at stake. But she lost reelection the next year before making inroads, and the Johnson administration has not appeared interested in moving on the proposal.

In October 2023, Johnson’s deputy mayor of labor relations, Bridget Early, held a meeting with representatives of the budget office and Law Department and other officials titled “Fitch Data Analysis,” according to public records obtained by the Tribune. A source familiar with the discussion said one of the goals that fall was to gauge whether the new administration wanted to revisit the Fitch recommendations.

It seems the answer was no. Another source familiar with the Johnson team’s Local 2 negotiations said the Fitch proposal was good policy but impossible for the city to implement unilaterally. It would require going toe-to-toe with the union to alter the CFD staffing requirements, known as minimum manning, enshrined in the powerful labor group’s latest contract.

The reasons for the ongoing bargaining quagmire since that contract expired in June 2021 are in dispute, but real issues remain.

The week before he stood alongside CTU President Stacy Davis Gates in March, Cleary played a police scanner audio clip for a reporter.

In the August clip, around the same time his union was protesting daily for a final contract during the Democratic National Convention, 911 operators were frantically searching for a way to get first responders to a South Side emergency: “We have several runs pending, several runs pending. If you’re available, please let Englewood know. We have no ambulances on run.”

“This is every day,” Cleary said of the tape. “This is not just a one-time occurrence.”

The union president has loudly called for city officials to add 20 ambulances to CFD’s fleet, a bid that amplifies what he says are the life-or-death stakes in his contract campaign. He even contends additional ambulances would make the city money.

Cleary also pointed to disciplinary protocol — especially how whether employees charged with misconduct get punished before hearings — as another sticky bargaining issue.

Almost two dozen firefighters sued the department last week for violating their constitutional rights with a set of February vehicle searches. The legal challenge was partly intended to prevent the city from “using the threat of future searches and seizures while (the union) and Chicago continue to negotiate a contract,” according to a copy of the suit.

A Law Department spokesperson said the city “does not comment on pending litigation.”

Cleary thinks he’ll win if the negotiations are turned over to an arbitrator after two late-April bargaining sessions, and views other parts of the contract as a “package deal” with the disciplinary rules.

He added he believes the Johnson administration is stalling to earn interest on the money already earmarked for the contract, which will include four years of back-paid raises.

“I’m willing to give them what they want, but they are holding up what we want,” Cleary said.

The Johnson official familiar with Local 2 negotiations, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about confidential talks, took umbrage at that description. The source said Local 2’s bargaining team has been caught up in an array of disjointed “pet issues” and “it’s really (Cleary) that’s holding these raises up.”

The Chicago Fire Department did not respond to questions about the ongoing contract dispute. Department leaders said in November that “incremental progress” was being made toward a deal, while Commissioner Annette Nance-Holt called for more ambulances and engines.

​​“This can has been kicked down the road a long time. The Fire Department has always been the last at the table,” she said then.

Johnson’s administration has so far not committed to meeting Cleary’s 20-ambulance demand, and it’s hard to imagine the cash-strapped city will take on that kind of expense. But behind closed doors, a long-considered proposal to rectify the ambulance shortage problem without adding to the city’s fiscal burdens resurfaced under Lightfoot.

In 2021, as the last Local 2 contract expired, her administration tapped Fitch to study optimizing CFD deployment by reducing firetruck staffing in order to beef up ambulance crews without driving up costs, according to the source familiar with the report.

The study found CFD has more than enough staff to quickly respond to the decreasing number of fires, but not always enough ambulance squads for timely runs. A reorganization would allow the department to operate more ambulances, Fitch consultants determined.

Emergency medical calls accounted for 75.9% of the department’s calls, while fire responses made up 21.4% during the time period in 2020 and 2021 that Fitch studied, per the report.

The Fitch team argued the smaller staff would align Chicago with other big cities like Philadelphia, Boston and Houston. The change would be safe because most civilian and firefighter injuries occur during complex emergencies where over 10 teams are on scene and injury rates are not tied to team size, the report said.

The source familiar with the Fitch study said Lightfoot’s bargaining team proposed reducing minimum manning on engines by one person while leaving it at five on ladder trucks, but was staunchly denied by then-Local 2 President Jim Tracy. The source added contract talks then stalled further with the advent of the 2023 mayoral race, when Local 2 endorsed Paul Vallas, leading to speculation it wanted to run out the clock until a more favorable mayor took office.

Tracy did not respond to a request for comment. But Cleary, who succeeded him in April 2023, said if any mayor were to ever move forward with the sort of broad reorganization Lightfoot sought, “there would be rioting in the streets.”

“You have no clue how dangerous what kind of situations you would be putting these guys in,” Cleary said of the proposal for shrunken teams. “It is unacceptable. That would never be accepted.”

CFD is required to man most engines with five people but can make exceptions on up to 35 engines per day, depending on department needs that may fluctuate based on staffing levels or volume of fire calls. Cleary said the union wants those exceptions to be eliminated, a nonstarter with the city’s bargaining team.

In criticizing the exceptions, Cleary pointed out that New York City requires five firefighters per engine to deal with its own complex urban emergencies. He also cited a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report made after the December 2021 death of Chicago firefighter Mashawn Plummer that determined the city lacked protocol for short-staffed teams and recommended “adequate staffing levels.”

In a city where a firetruck will often arrive before an ambulance during a medical emergency, Lightfoot was hardly the first politician to consider redeploying firefighters in order to increase ambulance staffing at the expense of those on trucks. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel declined to rule out cutting the number of firefighters per truck or closing firehouses to save money, Fire Commissioner Robert Hoff said he was “deathly against” the idea, citing safety concerns much like Cleary. Hoff resigned four months later.

Another factor potentially contributing to the slow pace of negotiations is the fact that firefighters are at the table after the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police’s contract ratification in fall 2023, which was also years-delayed.

A collective bargaining provision known as the “me, too clause” means the FOP contract secured by Johnson that gave police officers 20% raises over four years became the floor for Local 2’s next salary bumps. But Cleary’s team is apparently holding out for better in this contract, leaving the city’s bargaining team nonplussed, the Johnson source said.

The ostensible hardball could be a sign that Local 2 leadership simply smells blood in the water after Johnson emerged from a grueling CTU negotiation process vulnerable to further attacks that he’s beholden to his former union.

But the mayor denies that narrative and notes his 2025 budget does account for projected costs of the new Local 2 contract — if it lands in time.

“This is how dedicated and committed we are to workers in this city,” Johnson said last month. “Even though the Fire Department contract has not been settled, as a fiduciary, I have a responsibility to forecast and project what the labor costs will be.”

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