Council Considers Compromise with Winston-Salem, NC, Firefighters

The Winston-Salem City Council on Monday will consider a compromise in a tussle with Winston-Salem firefighters over how vacation and sick time is accrued.

The revised proposal doesn’t change a plan to essentially match firefighters’ time off with what other city employees accumulate annually, but it would delay implementation of the changes until Jan. 1, after a compensation study for the Winston-Salem Fire Department is completed.

City leaders have acknowledged that pay for Winston-Salem firefighters lags behind other departments, including Greensboro and High Point. City manager Pat Pate has argued that making pay competitive will be more of an incentive to retain firefighters and recruit new ones than the amount of time they can take off.

The Winston-Salem Professional Fire Fighters Association has aggressively opposed altering the vacation and sick time policy. The organization’s president, Perry Parrinello, said over the weekend that there’s no reason to trust the city to do right by him and other firefighters.

While the proposed revisions would have to wait until a compensation study is complete, the proposal “is not specific in when the fire department employees would actually receive those raises, if they get any raise at all,” Parrinello noted.

The suggested changes in sick and vacation pay are rooted in the schedules of Winston-Salem firefighters, who are on duty 24 hours at a time, with 48 hours off between shifts.

Currently, firefighters accrue time off at the same per-hour rate as other city employees. But because firefighters work the equivalent of 56-hour weeks, they accumulate more sick and vacation time.

Under Pate’s proposal, the city’s firefighters would accrue 12 hours of time off for every 24-hour shift. That would cut sick time from 288 hours to 134 annually, while vacation would be slashed from 240 hours to 112.

Those time-off totals would more closely match what other city employees accumulate annually.

But firefighters have argued that because they are scheduled differently than other city employees, how they accrue time off should also be unique.

“We do not feel that the pay study will yield the salaries to actually put us on par with our counterparts across the state or Piedmont Triad area,” added Parrinello.

June surprise

Parrinello and other city firefighters were caught off guard when the city ditched its original timeline for bringing the proposed changes to council for a vote and instead added it to a meeting agenda in June — nearly two months ahead of the original schedule.

At that meeting, Councilwoman Regina Ford Hall reminded her colleagues about discussions of the proposal a week earlier.

“At the end of that presentation, there was a recommendation for this to come back to council in the fall and for us to address that then,” she said.

At the earlier meeting on June 9, Assistant City Manager Sharon Wojda provided a detailed timeline — accompanied by a PowerPoint slide — for next steps on the proposed changes.

That schedule called for the proposal to be brought to council’s General Government Committee Aug. 11, then to the full council for a vote on Sept. 2.

Instead, the item showed up on the June 16 agenda.

“After the ( June 9) Committee of the Whole meeting, staff was asked to bring these changes to council for adoption in June with the other personnel resolution changes,” according to a document accompanying the agenda item.

Given the original timeline, “I am not necessarily supportive of (voting on) that tonight,” Hall said at the June 16 meeting.

Instead, she suggested bringing the proposal back to the council at the Aug. 4 meeting. Her motion passed unanimously.

© 2025 Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.. Visit www.journalnow.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.