The city of Boston and the men who fill the ranks of the Boston Fire Department simply can't get along. Contract disputes have long since gone nuclear and now any controversy turns into a five-alarm blaze of rhetoric and posturing perfectly designed for the city's competitive media outlets.
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Results tagged “pensions”
It's a time-honored tradition: when laws get tough, people scramble to avoid them. The latest instance of this phenomenon comes with Boston firefighters, who are hurrying to cash in their pensions before a new law goes into effect that would reduce the size of said pensions. Firefighters who were injured on the job while filling in for a (higher-paid) supervisor used to be able to get additional pension money when filing for disability, due to their temporarily elevated status. About 100 firefighters had filed for such benefits over the past six years, but the change in the law has prompted 29 former flame-battlers to try to get in on the hot action this week (perhaps before beginning their bodybuilding careers). The new law bases pension for disabled firefighters on the firefighters' own average salary, not that of supervisors.
The pensions are enabled by a 1945 law that ensures higher payouts for those who have worked for at least 20 years or whose positions are eliminated. The law was originally intended to protect workers, but now it seems to be costing taxpayers and benefiting already-wealthy middle managers who are working new jobs while receiving pensions from the state.
--Mayor Menino has suspended one of his own employees, the head of the Department of Public Works, for letting an employee work from her parent's house in Venezuela, which probably wouldn't have been a big deal if the arrangement hadn't lasted for five months. [Boston Globe]
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