THE CHIEF LEADER
McAllan Remembered As A Battler to The End
Former EMS Union Head
By ARI PAUL
04/10/09
The pomp and circumstance at Richard McAllan's funeral in Asbury Park, N.J. March 31 could be read two ways.
With Fire Department officials in uniform honoring him with bagpipes outside the church, it could be seen as a celebratory farewell to an outstanding member of the FDNY family. It could also be read as an attempt by a department that Mr. McAllan, the former Local 2507 of District Council 37 president representing Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics, fought every day until his death to have his members removed from, to make certain he was really gone.
A Crusader and a Litigator
As a Paramedic in upper Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s, he was known for exposing substandard working conditions that resulted in inadequate patient care. As Local 2507 president and as a retiree, he was famous for suing every Mayor since Ed Koch on a variety of issues concerning the Emergency Medical Service.
His friends considered his fights a service for the public good. "Richie was one of the visionaries in the beginning [of EMS] to help direct things in the right way," said former Paramedic Danny Burstein during the viewing before the funeral in the nearby town of Neptune.
Mr. McAllan was born on July 4, 1951 near Asbury Park. Those who knew him described him as someone who loved to argue at an early age, especially with his more-conservative brother about politics and with his father, a Boston Red Sox fan, about baseball.
Mr. McAllan had a life-long interest in astrology and the occult, and believed in the power of prophecy. So while working as a part-time taxi driver in The Bronx in 1973 to help pay for his graduate school economics class at The New School for Social Research, he came across an EMS ambulance crew and began talking to them. He was intrigued by their work, and Mr. McAllan saw the incident as no accident; it was a calling to the job.
Among First City Paramedics
In 1974, he became a part of the first Paramedic class in the city, trained at Jacoby Hospital in The Bronx. Local 3621 of DC 37 President Tom Eppinger, who represents EMS officers and started with the agency in 1989, explained that members of this first class were picked for their intelligence. Some of these first graduates went on to be doctors or higher-ranking officials in other agencies, he said.
In his early years as a Paramedic, Mr. McAllan was known for being talkative and aggressive during downtime on the job, but always calm under the constant stress of the work.
"He was an improviser," said Barbara Taylor, a former Paramedic who worked with him for many years.
But even as a newcomer to the job, he made his grievances clear from the beginning and became Local 2507'secretary-treasurer within a year. In 1980 he found a specific tool for fighting what he saw as gross inadequacies about EMS: the media.
That year, the New York Post ran a story about what it described as a nightmarish eight-hour ambulance shift in upper Manhattan: brokendown vehicles, a shortage of back-up and crank 911 calls. He went on to expose other issues, especially long response times, in various news outlets, including THE CHIEF-LEADER.
Workers Drew Public's Ire
According to Mr. Eppinger, response times in the 1970s and '80s were severely slow, but public outrage was focused on the Paramedics and EMTs. It was common in those days, Mr. Eppinger recalled, for EMS responders to arrive at a residence to attend to a patient after a long delay due to broken equipment or traveling a long distance, and encounter hostility from the patient's family members.
"They were blaming the worker," he said.
Mr. Eppinger said that slow response times had to do with a shortage of staff and old, constantly breaking down ambulances. But there was also an abuse of the EMS system, he recalled, because many residents couldn't afford health care, so patients would exaggerate the severity of their problems to 911 dispatchers in order to get care. Mr. McAllan's use of the media and testimony at the City Council put the spotlight on the city administration and resulted in many improvements. Such victories ultimately helped him win the Local 2507 presidency in 1987 after losing two previous elections.
A Civil Service Stickler
In 1988, he fought the Koch administration for putting uncertified cadet responders in the field with Local 2507 members, alleging that it was part of a grand scheme by the administration to circumvent civil service rules. That same year, Mr. McAllan fought to protect a group of provisional EMS workers who had been fired for taking part in a sick-out, which is illegal under the state's Taylor Law, arguing that they deserved the same hearing rights that full-time civil servants enjoy.
As easily as he picked fights with Mayors, he picked them with other labor leaders. In 1989, when most unions supported Democrat David Dinkins for Mayor, Mr. McAllan supported Republican Rudy Giuliani. Unions had blasted Mr. Giuliani for what they saw as an anti-union attitude, but Local 2507 endorsed him because it regarded him as the most fit to clean up violent crime in the city—with as many as 2,000 murders a year—that was overburdening the EMS system.
But the coziness didn't last when Mr. Giuliani came into office one term later. Mr. McAllan, no longer Local 2507 president but still active in the union, was a particularly fierce critic of the Giuliani administration and its attempts to contract out ambulance services. He exposed the past sexual transgressions of the director of one large private ambulance company who received access to the city's 911 radio frequency after making major campaign contributions to Mr. Giuliani, and questioned the adequacy of Fire Department radios in high-rise buildings. His skepticism on that issue found tragic justification on 9/11.
Mr. McAllan continued to fight DC 37's leadership, including then-Executive Director Stanley Hill. For Mr. McAllan, DC 37 had a general plan for improving wages, benefits and working conditions for its members that did not address the specific needs of EMS responders.
The rift widened between the local and the DC 37 leadership when Mr. McAllan pushed for a wage pact mediated by the union's former chief negotiator, Alan R. Viani, in 1988 that gave a substantial pay increase to EMTs and Paramedics, according to Mr. McAllan's chief assistant and long-time friend Alan Saly.
"They won the biggest pay raise in the history of EMS," Mr. Saly said. "They won a five-year step-pay plan, they won protection against arbitrary transfers, they won a critical instances debriefing unit. There were about 10 different points that Rich and Viani forced upon the city and, I must say, District Council 37."
Mr. Saly added the umbrella organization believed that such a generous settlement was wrong because it broke from the pattern the other DC 37 locals had with the city.
Not Like Rest of Locals
"Richie's position was, 'We're emergency responders. We're in a different category,'" Mr. Saly said.
Mr. McAllan lost his re-election bid in 1990 to Richard Gutwirth, although he served as vice president and on the union's executive board after that.
"People felt that Rich was too confrontational towards management," Mr. Saly explained. "He was completely adversarial, and they felt that he was so adversarial that he wouldn't be the best person to be the president to negotiate."
He said that Mr. Gutwirth was known more for picking which battles he would fight and which disputes he would negotiate with management.
"Richard Gutwirth was an excellent campaigner and a great president," he said. "He was tough on management, too."
Mr. McAllan's lasting legacy in EMS, said Mr. Saly, was the protection of civil service rights.
"He compelled the city to give exams for both EMT and Paramedic and forced the city to give civil service exams," Mr. Saly said. "He also stopped the broadbanding of EMS's titles."
When EMS, once under the auspices of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, merged with the Fire Department in 1996, the acquisition became a new rallying cause for Mr. McAllan. He continued to press to undo the merger, based on his longheld position that EMS should be a stand-alone agency. Those at last week's funeral explained that EMS members have been treated like second class citizens next to Firefighters and fire officers.
Old Foes Pay Respects
Mr. McAllan was an obsessive collector of documents and photographs and leaves behind 400 boxes of papers on EMS alone. Mr. Saly hopes to have many of those boxes turned over to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
While many people attended the first casket-viewing March 30, the next day's viewing and funeral were sparsely attended. Mr. Eppinger and Local 2507 officer Donald Faeth attended along with EMS Chief John Peruggia. And these were all people Mr. McAllan had fought with at one point or another, even though they all wanted the same thing in the end: a better, more efficient EMS. But whenever Mr. McAllan saw an injustice— whether it was coming from City Hall, the FDNY or DC 37—he chose to fight aggressively rather than use diplomacy or pick his battles carefully, believing every fight could end in victory.
"He didn't think anything was a long shot," Mr. Saly said.
Mr. Saly added that this was an approach to politics he learned from his early years with EMS: that one never gives up on trying to save a patient until the end.
"As long as there's a pulse," he said.
