For years, workers at Citywide Mobile Response, a Bronx-based ambulance service, griped about what they described as their absentee union. Whenever medical equipment and safe trucks were in low supply, they said, their complaints to management fell on deaf ears — and their union was nowhere to be found.
The frustrations led to a campaign to kick out their union, Local 741 of the Specialty Trades Union, and join a new one — but they had to move quickly, with just a 30-day window under federal labor law to make their escape.
In just five days in late January, Citywide workers gathered signatures from more than half of their 200-plus colleagues, exceeding the 30% required to request an election with the National Labor Relations Board. They prevailed in a blowout election on March 6, voting 116 to 14 to kick out their union, Local 741 of the Specialty Trades Union, and join 1199SEIU. Eight more workers voted to not have a union at all.
“For the seven years that I’ve been here, it’s been an organization that’s been absent,” Citywide emergency medical technician Felix Rivera said of Local 741. “Not one person” out of the dozens of employees who Rivera personally canvassed said they wanted to keep the union, he said.
“My assumption of the last seven years was that they were management friendly, not members friendly,” added Rivera.
The effort was a culmination of years of frustration with Local 741. The local was previously known as Local 124 RAISE, an affiliate of the International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades, a union that specializes in signing contracts friendly to management.
The RAISE local had been led by James Bernardone, alleged by prosecutors to have been a soldier in the Genovese crime family before he pleaded guilty to charges relating to construction racketeering. It also represented workers at Sanitation Salvage, a Bronx commercial garbage collection company that closed in 2018 after a 21-year-old worker fatally fell off of a truck and the company tried to cover up the incident by claiming he was a homeless man.
Longtime Citywide employees said they paid $34 in dues to Local 741 every month, but they never met or knew who their shop stewards and representatives were. Workers are unsure even how long ago the contract, which they said auto-renews about every three years, was first put in place or how workers first came to affiliate with the union.
Local 741’s website, workers told THE CITY, does not have valid emails to contact, and numerous calls to the union over the years went unreturned.
That meant that when issues arose on the job — such as disciplinary actions against employees or safety issues as serious as trucks having faulty brakes or steering trouble — they felt they had nowhere to turn to, said Rivera, who led the efforts to leave Local 741. Workers had to report these issues to Citywide, only to go months without them being addressed, Rivera and another worker told THE CITY.
“Members have talked about bringing it up to the union, but the union was so absent that it felt pointless even bringing it to the union, because we can’t even get a hold of them,” he said.
Gary Rothman, the attorney representing Local 741, said in a phone call that the union “would vehemently disagree” with those allegations.
“Members called the union and their telephone calls were returned,” he said. “The union believes it adequately and properly serviced this shop.”
The victory is a rebuke not only of their former union but their employer, who workers said does not give them adequate resources and support to do their jobs well.
EMTs and paramedics, both in the public and private sector, are among the nation’s lowest-paid medical workers and have some of the highest rates of mental health issues and substance abuse. EMS agencies, in New York and nationwide, are chronically understaffed.
“Excuse my language, but this is a fucked up job to do, to see people bleeding and hurt and dying — it’s not a fun job,” said Alexa Ruiz, an EMT who started working at Citywide last year. And then the employer is not interested in maintaining that employee, they’re not interested in mentoring that employee.”
BronxCare EMT Alexa Ruiz commutes to work from Inwood, March 28, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Workers can boot their existing unions, a process known as decertifying, only during a 30-day “window period” that ends two months before their current collective bargaining agreement’s expiration date. When workers decertify, they can petition a vote to join another union, as the Citywide workers did, or become non-union. Because Citywide’s union contract auto-renewed, workers had little idea of when their window of opportunity even was to decertify.
They had considered decertifying once before, about three years ago, but missed their window. “It didn’t evolve beyond a few conversations,” Rivera said.
After the Citywide workers’ first decertification attempt failed to get off the ground, Local 741 announced workers would be able to vote to select their delegates and stewards, but many workers were still frustrated because they could not communicate directly with union leadership. Eventually many of those individuals left Citywide, Rivera said.
That meant issues on the job continued to fester. Over and over again, workers who spoke with THE CITY mentioned that their fleet of trucks are often sidelined, which means longer wait times for patients.
Ruiz said that on multiple occasions her ambulance was put out of service because smoke from the engine had entered the inner compartment of the vehicle. On another occasion, the glove compartment spontaneously collapsed on her lap.
“I want to be able to work for a company that I take pride in, that people are not looking at me like I’m a psychopath in a smoking vehicle leaving them in a cloud of smoke,” she said.
In fact, Ruiz said Citywide’s poor reputation among some current and former workers earned it a well-known derisive nickname: “They call it ‘Shittywide.’”
As the contract deadline neared this year, workers were better prepared. They joined forces with EMS PAC, an independent organization that advocates for both union and non-union paramedics and EMTs. Walter Adler, an EMT and co-founder of the organization, is a member of 1199SEIU through his day job, and encouraged the Citywide workers to join his union.
His group helped workers gather signatures, and 1199SEIU got involved about a week before Citywide workers submitted their election bid to the federal labor board on Feb. 3.
Local 741 pushed back. The union submitted multiple objections against Citywide related to the March election results to the federal National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections. Among them, the union alleges that Citywide provided an incomplete and inaccurate voter list and that it improperly used ineligible individuals — an HR manager and an assistant — as its election observers. Objections to union election results with a wide margin of victory are usually unsuccessful.
Rothman, Local 741’s attorney, declined to comment on the union’s objections, saying that the process would play out with the NLRB. Attorneys for Citywide did not respond to requests for comment.
With the election now behind them, workers are looking forward to contract negotiations and electing their shop stewards and representatives, Rivera said. By law, workers have to wait until the NLRB evaluates Local 741’s challenges and certifies the election results in order to begin bargaining.
“Despite working in unsafe and difficult conditions without pay commensurate for their profession, Citywide EMS workers always put their patients first,” 1199SEIU president David Greenberg said in a statement. “We are proud to represent these dedicated first responders in their fight for dignity and respect.”
As that plays out, the workers will gather in the coming months to determine specific contract priorities, but both Rivera and Ruiz mentioned pay, vehicle safety and improved health insurance and benefits among their top issues.
“Things are getting done the right way this time around. It’s not going to just happen overnight, like the last time that things were renewed without our knowledge,” said Rivera. “We’re not dealing with 741, we’re dealing with a real union this time.”
And workers also had a message for their bosses: “Citywide needs to wake up, and they need to realize that they have treasures working under them,” said Ruiz. “We are treasures of the health care world.”
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