• The firefighter's contract stipulates a 7-day pay period starting at 7am Sunday.
• Shifts are scheduled in blocks of 8 days on a rotating 8-week cycle.
• The number of scheduled hours in a pay period varies from 34 to 48.
• The average number of scheduled hours in a pay period is 42.

Mr. Block assumed an 8-day pay period aligned with the scheduling cycle.

There are a number of problems with using 8 days as the pay period:

• Every 8-day schedule block spans two actual 7-day pay periods.
• The 7-day pay period may span two 8-day schedule blocks.
• The start of a group of four days with scheduled shifts is usually not the start of a pay period.
• In weeks 4 and 5 of the cycle, when firefighters complete their scheduled shifts the pay period is over.
• In weeks 6 and 7 of the cycle, there is only one shift left in the pay period when scheduled hours are complete.
• Workers in the private sector may be required to work a total of 40 hours, but they are not required to work 40 specific hours as they are in Mr. Block's analysis.

The only way to compare a firefighter's schedule to a 40-hour week in the private sector would be to use the 7-day pay period, and it makes sense to do so because that is the pay period specified in the contract.

2. Methodological Errors

Use of Shifts vs Hours

Here is an example (from page 11 of the foils presented at the 6/6/2018 town council meeting). The circled area shows a lieutenant working two overtime shifts after his scheduled day shifts on 7/16 and 7/17/2017.

The red circle indicates that he had been paid for overtime without having worked all scheduled shifts.

So for this firefighter, two 14-hour night shifts were counted as overtime (28 hours at time and a half = 42 hours of regular wages).

A careful examination of the detailed operational history reveals that in fact these were late runs:

• The 7/16 night shift entry is documented in the accountability log as a 1/2 hour holdover on run #2701
• The 7/17 night shift entry is documented as a 1 hour holdover on run #2094

The two entries totaled 1.5 hours. Under the current contract, firefighters are entitled to overtime wages for late runs, so this would have actually incurred 2.25 hours of regular wages, but Mr. Block counted it as two full night shifts or 42 hours of regular wages. There are hundreds of late runs in the data.

3. Sensational Anecdotal Claims Presented with No Documentation

and local talk radio (at 38:30 in the audio clip) presenting claims of gross abuse of overtime policies by East Greenwich firefighters, but with no support beyond undocumented anecdotal evidence or summaries based on the flawed methodology previously identified.

They also ignore the fact that there is a strict policy for offering voluntary overtime hours that rules out the kind of behavior that Mr. Block alleges, with several years of history to show that it is being followed.

4. Failure to Distinguish Orderbacks from Voluntary Overtime

Allegations of "gaming the system" assume that overtime shifts are voluntary, ignoring the fact that firefighters are often ordered to work an overtime shift that they otherwise would not choose to.

There is no way to tell from the accountability data whether a firefighter worked an overtime shift voluntarily or was ordered in.

We obtained the orderback lists for firefighters and officers through an APRA request. These show that between January 2017 and October 2018 firefighters were ordered to work 268 overtime shifts, and that the prevalence of orderbacks is much higher in recent months.

• There were 69 orderbacks in calendar year 2017
• There have been 199 orderbacks so far in 2018

This means that 199 times in 2018, an overtime shift was offered and no one volunteered to take it. This calls into question the assertion that firefighters are "gaming the system" to get as many overtime hours as they can.

Finally, at the close of his presentation, he said that we needed to "dive deeper and understand" the data. We took this as an invitation to conduct a thorough, quantitative analysis of the overtime data.

A Careful, Thorough Quantitative Analysis

Using data from an APRA request for the same data supplied to Mr. Block, we constructed a shift-by-shift operational history of the East Greenwich fire department.

From the operational history, we constructed a table of hours worked and wages earned for every firefighter for every pay period that overlapped any part of FY2018 (6/25/2017-5/24/2018) in the data.

Effect of Changes to Overtime Policy

In addition, we computed overtime wages that would be paid under policies common in the private sector: only hours beyond the number of scheduled firefighter duty hours in the pay period qualify for overtime, with vacation and other types of leave not counted as hours worked.

We computed a second overtime wage that allowed collateral duty hours worked (which are all voluntary) to be used to satisfy the required number of hours to receive overtime (with overtime still paid only on firefighter duty hours).

• The overtime policy modeled after the private sector would reduce overtime costs by 8.3%
• The overtime policy that takes collateral duty into account (but only for hours worked) would reduce them by 6.4%.
• In round numbers, if the town budget is $63 million and overtime costs are $1 million, these percentages represent $83,000 and $64,000 in savings. Both round to one tenth of one percent of the total budget, so this is not the existential threat to the town's financial health that it has been made out to be.

Highest Firefighter Compensation

• The town council suggested that a firefighter was "on track" to make $170,000 in wages and $215,000 in total compensation. This is vastly overstated (to his credit, Mr. Block was careful to distance himself from this slide when it was put up).
• The highest paid firefighter will earn about $140,000 in wages.
• This individual will average about 79 hours per week in scheduled duty, overtime, and collateral duty.

"Gaming the System"

• The town council claims that shift swapping is the major reason for high overtime costs. The foil below was posted on the town website. There is not a single instance of this scenario in the operational history, it is a complete fabrication. Even the $1.2 million number is a result of cherry-picking the worst six months of FY2018 and extrapolating to a full year.
• The highest paid firefighter in the data worked all scheduled shifts in 78% of pay periods and had only one swap.