Listen: ‘Sinister’ Reasons for NYC’s Lifeguard Shortage Revealed!
New York City beaches and pools are still grappling with a shortage of lifeguards—veteran lifeguard and author Janet Fash has some insights into the many institutionalized problems undermining public safety.
By Joe Maniscalco
This summer, New York City beaches are once again operating with a shortage of qualified lifeguards—and the woman who spent nearly a half century guarding those beaches says there is something more “sinister” about the chronic shortfall than what’s routinely reported.
Area beaches opened on Memorial Day weekend this year with just 370 lifeguards to protect New York City’s 14 miles of public beaches stretching from Orchard Beach in the Bronx to Wolfe’s Pond Park Beach on Staten Island.
Sure, that’s up from the paltry 280 lifeguards the Parks Department had to open the season last year. It’s an improvement, but far short of the true number of lifeguards New York City needs to protect the public.
The Parks Department actually needs somewhere on the order of 1,400 lifeguards to fully protect its eight public beaches and 53 outdoor pools. And the need couldn’t be more dire.
Five people drowned at New York City beaches and pools last summer. The year prior, seven more people woke up for a day at the beach and never made it home alive.
District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido has lauded Mayor Zohran Mamdani for helping to recruit new lifeguards this year. DC 37 Local 461 represents rank and file lifeguards, while DC 37 Local 508 represents supervisors.
But during the latest episode of the Labor and Healthcare Confidential on WBAI, Janet Fash, New York City’s first female lifeguard chief, told Work-Bites and host Marianne Pizzitola how decades of entrenched union corruption and worker exploitation actually lies at the heart of New York City’s lifeguard problem.
“We were forever at a disadvantage because both our union and our management were one and the same,” Fash said.
Janet Fash talked about her decades-long career in Rockaway as a New York City lifeguard—and her newly-released memoir “Lifeguard A Love Story”—on the latest Labor and Healthcare Confidential episode with host Marianne Pizzitola.
The rot runs deep, according to Fash, and goes back more than 40 years with the ascension of Peter Stein. Known as “Boss of the Beach,” Stein retired last year as president of Local 508 after spending decades running New York City beaches like his own personal fiefdom, consolidating power and retaliating against dissenting voices pushing transparency and democratizing the union.
Fash has chronicled it all in a new memoir with Clio Chang from Simon & Schuster called “Lifeguard A Love Story.”
As a young lifeguard, Fash said she wasn’t even aware she was a union member. Later she said, rank and file lifeguards were kept in the dark about their own union contract, denied advancement, and punished for blowing the whistle on sexual harassment.
All the cronyism and corruption ultimately threatened public safety, too.
“They’re still putting in some people that were never ocean lifeguards on the beach as supervisors—and that scares me for the public,” Fash said.
Fash has seen a lot of mayoral administrations come and go. She once marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but missed the opportunity to try and enlist Hizzoner’s aid in addressing the systemic problems at New York City beaches and pools.
“It’s an octopus,” she said. “I wasn’t able to articulate it.”
Today, Fash is holding out hope that the Mamdani administration will help finally usher in the changes needed to clean up the mess. But she remains pessimistic, too, due to the state of the union and level of rank and file participation.
“They are making changes—but it is very ingrained,” she said. What’s needed, according to Fash, is re-writing Local 461’s constitution so that the 1,200 members who pay dues have a voice and can fully participate in running their own union.
“[But] I think that is going to take a lot more years,” she said.
Listen to the complete wide-ranging interview below with Janet Fash below: