It pays to be a Los Angeles firefighter — who can earn up to $300,000 a year in overtime — according to study released Tuesday of public employee compensation across California.
The top 20 overtime earners by public workers across the state were firefighters for the city of Los Angeles — where overtime payouts rose 18 percent from last year, according to a Nevada-based survey of 246,000 public employees in California. Each top earner had pocketed outsized paychecks for at least three years.
The extra hours allowed one firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department last year to kick up his total pay to $404,308 — more than four times his base salary, according to the study by Transparent California, a project of the Las Vegas-based Nevada Policy Research Institute.
Two other L.A. firefighters also earned around $300,000 in overtime, according to the survey.
The hefty amount of overtime worked by just a few employees can be dangerous, especially for firefighters, said study author Robert Fellner of Transparent California. These overtime payments indicate an average workweek of more than 100 hours, said Fellner, director of research for the Nevada-based nonprofit.
“This is a recipe for disaster given the life-or-death situations firefighters routinely encounter,” Fellner said of the long hours it would take to incur so much overtime.