Understanding the Job

As a young man, Joe Rose’s desire to help others launched his first career as a firefighter and paramedic, which led to his current calling as an employment and labor attorney. His credo: “Working Hard for Working People.” 

“I’m a true believer,” says Rose, a husband and father of two. “In my world, in the employment realm particularly, you usually pick a side. You’re either all plaintiff—and you represent only the employees suing the employers—or you’re all defense, and you work only for the companies and corporations. But I don’t have divided loyalties, because I’m always looking for a legal, ethical and morally right outcome no matter what the circumstance. 

“Maybe that’s Pollyanna,” he adds, “but that’s how I try to approach my practice.”

Born in Detroit, his mother Marty moved to California to escape an abusive relationship when Rose was only 2. She supported the family by working as a waitress at Culver City’s legendary Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, where she met Joe’s adopted father, Wayne.

“He was working for the phone company down here in Southern California,” says Rose. “Then he moved into the movie business and became a special effects artist. He was a union guy. He spent over 40 years as a member of the International Association of Theater and Screen Employees—Local 44. He worked his ass off. He worked long hours. But he was able to make a living wage. My parents still live in the same town I grew up in, Moorpark, and they have a comfortable retirement because of his membership, his union pension, and the benefits that he received by investing 40 years of his life in that trade.”

Rose himself didn’t have a clear direction in high school. “I didn’t think the usual college career route was for me,” he says. “I wanted something more exciting and unusual.” So as a senior, he entered a vocational program that earned him credits toward graduation. While his classmates sat in class, Rose learned firefighting. 

“I’m 17 years old,” he remembers. “I’d get off from school at noon, I’d go over to the local firehouse, which was about a mile away from the high school. I was the fourth man on the fire engine.” Within the first few months on the job, he used CPR to save a man in cardiac arrest. “I thought, ‘This is awesome. I love the job. I feel like I’m tangibly helping someone.’”

After getting his EMT certification he became a paramedic at age 19. “I couldn’t even drink a beer legally but I was administering morphine and Valium,” he remembers. “It was a great career. I moved up to Northern California and became a firefighter and paramedic there.”

Most of the work he did with the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District involved structure fires—houses and buildings and cars—but he was still a teenager when he fought his first wildfire. 

“Eldorado National Forest, one of the most memorable wildfires I remember being on, was up in that region, kind of on highway 50, between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe,” he says. “It was crazy. We got burned over. We had floating pumps in the American River that we were using to fight the fire, and we lost a lot of structures. Then it was a camp-out for weeks up there while we were putting the fire out.”

In 2001, Rose left firefighting and graduated Lincoln Law School of Sacramento in 2004. These days, he represents firefighters, truckers, small business owners, and public sector labor organizations throughout the Central Valley.

“I represented the labor union for the civil servants in the city of Stockton when they went through what was, at the time, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history,” he says. “That was an experience—being in bankruptcy court with a bunch of city workers who were going to lose their pensions and their health care and their salaries and benefits. It was a pretty significant hardship that was going to befall them. We navigated through that and came out the other end.”

He also kept his hand in his previous career as a two-time board member for the El Dorado County Fire Protection District.

“When I was in law school, because of my background, I immediately got work within a firm that represented a lot of police officer and firefighter labor organizations,” he says. “Even to this day, I represent health care providers. … I tell the medics and doctors that one of the advantages you get with me is you don’t have to tell me what the significance of giving lidocaine to a third-degree heart block is. You get some credibility with them, because you’ve been there, done that. It’s not a lawyer who doesn’t understand the job.”