A federal judge has ordered the city to pay an estimated $128 million in back wages to minorities who applied to be firefighters with the FDNY, which is still 97 percent white and allegedly racist. Black and Hispanic applicants who took the department’s screening test in 1999 or 2002 and were not selected will be contacted about the settlement, which is intended to "recreate the conditions and relationships that would have been had there been no unlawful discrimination."
An expert witness for the Justice Department, Bernard Siskin, calculated the amount of wages black and Hispanic applicants would have earned had they passed the entrance exam at the same rates as white applicants. The amount to be paid out, however, will be offset against how much the applicants actually earned during the time period they could have been firefighters. But the City Law Department claims that when the final calculations are made, the city will have to pay will be far less than $128 million, and maybe nothing at all.
The ruling comes on the eve of the FDNY's annual testing, which begins next week with a new "racially acceptable" test, as the Daily News puts it. 61,000 applicants will compete for a few thousand positions, and NY1 reports that blacks make up 23 percent of the applicants and another 23 percent are Hispanic. And FDNY Commissioner Sal Cassano told the City Council yesterday that a record number of women are applying: 3,481, which is nearly triple the 1,401 females who signed up the last time the test was given in 2007.
There are currently just 24 female firefighters, down from 41 whom the FDNY was forced to accept after a court order in 1982. Michele Maglione, FDNY assistant commissioner for recruitment and diversity, told the City Council that being a firefighter is “a very physical job. I don’t know that every woman wants to be a firefighter. Our job is to go out and find women who do."
