Help on the way?
At the 911 center, stress, long hours and now a dispute over overtime pay
The 2:30 p.m. shift change on a recent Monday was an orderly affair. Workers formed a line to clock in at the front of the hushed, dimly lit room and relieved their coworkers, avoiding disruption.
It was befitting of the workplace’s seriousness: Here, in an unremarkable three-story brick building on Lexington Avenue in Point Breeze, every emergency call in Allegheny County — about 1.3 million a year — is answered by a staff of roughly 260 people.
After checking their seating assignments, the afternoon shift workers settled in front of an array of six computer monitors that display call logs, incident forms, highway cameras, dispatch channels and detailed maps that, among other things, show the location of every fire hydrant and heart defibrillator.
By its nature, the structure of the 911 emergency system is given little thought by the general public until it’s needed.
For these workers, emergency is the routine.
“It takes a very specific person, but once you find that person, they tend to stay,” said Marissa Williams, the county’s 911 director.
The problem for the county lately — and for 911 dispatch centers across the country — is that recruiting people has become challenging. It requires a specialized blend of skills — someone who can multi-task between the mundane and the urgent, communicating clearly with several people during a emergency and thriving in a virtually windowless office environment in front of a computer for an entire shift.
A dispatcher must assist people in their most tense and vulnerable moments, often without ever finding out how the situation eventually played out or how the 911 center made an impact.
“I describe it as reading a bunch of books and never getting to the ending,” Ms. Williams said. “That’s kind of how it is for your brain whenever you go home at night.
“It’s an industrywide situation, finding people who can do this job,” she added, “finding people who want to sit in a room with computers in front of them, be away from their family for a long time, be able to listen to someone screaming in their ear that their husband is beating them and at the same time listening to their coworker ask them what they want for dinner.”
Ms. Williams insists the emergency management system, which has a budget of $45 million for 2018, is fully staffed and can handle incoming calls.
But records show workers have increasingly been logging overtime to
keep the center going.
Emergency management employees worked 70,308 hours of overtime in 2016, earning nearly $2.5 million in time-and-a-half pay, the most recent year the county has made available through a public records request.
It was at least the fourth consecutive year that overtime hours for emergency officials increased, up from 45,523 hours — with about $1.5 million in overtime wages earned — in 2013.
The department has consistently ranked third behind the Kane Regional Centers, a system of nursing homes, and the county jail in most overtime hours.
Often, the scheduling crunch falls to the dispatch center’s 15 shift commanders — the first-line supervisors who work, three each shift, to oversee operations, answer questions and trace phone calls. Some have reported added stress with the increased overtime, especially when also working with younger employees who have replaced retirees.
“I’ve actually chased people down the hall to catch them as they’re getting in their car,” said Chuck Kuntz, a 62-year-old supervisor who has worked in 911 dispatch for 39 years.
“I need a certain amount of people. If I have someone who comes in and becomes sick, somebody has to stay until 11,” he said. “It doesn’t make me anyone’s favorite, but it is what it is. It’s the nature of the beast.”
A new labor contract approved this year has rankled the first-level supervisors. They voted to unionize in 2014 and joined an existing contract negotiated by the Service Employees International Union Local 668. The union represents county employees across several departments, including administrative services; emergency services; health, human services; parks; and public works.
A new contract approved this year won the support of about 150 supervisors across the county, but was unanimously rejected by the 15 disptach center supervisors.
The central issue for the 15 supervisors was a provision that makes it harder to receive overtime pay and instead forces them to take days off as compensation, which can lead to erratic schedules.
“They could work me a couple 16-hour days and then force me off the rest of the week,” Mr. Kuntz said.
Lately, he said that retirements have led to a loss of expertise. He spends much of his time, he said, floating around to different desks and answering basic questions. That can pull him away from more important duties.
“At some point you become ineffective — multitasking is kind of a myth,” he said.
A planned move of the 911 center, which officials say has outgrown the current building, has also generated backlash from employees.
The problem? The new center will be in a building near Pittsburgh International Airport, in the farthest reaches of western Allegheny County. Many employees accustomed to the central location of Point Breeze will face a lengthy commute tacked onto a stressful shift.
“We’re bleeding people, and the bleeding is going to continue because of the relocation of the center,” Mr. Kuntz said.
Low unemployment rates have pressed 911 centers to better market themselves as a career.
“When the unemployment rate is low, it’s a competitive work environment,” said Chris Carver, operations director for the National Emergency Number Association, a trade group. “If there’s only a limited pool of workers, we need to be creative.”
Staffing issues, he added, are a side effect of the centers “incorrectly identifying how may folks they actually need to handle the volume.”
Matthew Brown, chief of the county’s Department of Emergency Services, declined to discuss the union’s complaints or the contract bargaining.
He did not share specifics on how the county determines when employees are assigned to work, beyond saying the county “assesses levels of staffing based off of known call volumes for the day of week, time of day and known events (like) weather (and) planned events, as well as recognized, data-driven formulas for call-taking volume.”
Ms. Williams said prospective dispatchers spend eight weeks in classroom training and several weeks shadowing a mentor on the job. During a recent visit, trainees were paired with workers, sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of the computer screens.
“Trainers talk a lot about stress management — exercising, eating right, making sure they get their breaks and take a walk outside,” she said.
Mr. Brown acknowledged the move will create difficulties — he lives in the southern suburbs and will have a long drive to the center — but said, on the whole, it will be a better working environment. The new 78,000-square-foot facility has an outdoor walking path and big windows, a welcome change from the Lexington Avenue building.
“Our employees are absolutely important,” he said. “They do a great job for us, and show great pride in their work, and we are proud to have them.”