The Firefighters

[Pilmour Boy]

What views do people here have on the strike? Do they deserve a 40% pay rise? Do they have antiquated working practices? Are they right to strike? All wade in...

[puzzled]

Firefighting is a difficult and dangerous job. However, the government can not afford to grant a 40% pay rise without unleashing the floodgates for public sector pay demands. Onething the FireBrigadeUnion (FBU) should do is give up persuing a national pay policy - a firefighter in london has a more dangerous job in london then say west wales and needs to be paid far more just to maintain the same standard of living. If you compare the UK pay to the rest of europe it is not great but not terrible.

One thing for certain is that the Army should cross the picket lines to use modern equipment - the idea that peoples' lives should be put in danger simply for the sake of outdated left-win ideology is obscene.

[Greebo]

Given the job they do - risking their lives a helluva lot of the time - yeah I'd say they deserved around 30k/year

25 minimum

[Pilmour Boy]

Paying people on how dangerous their job is is stupid. Maybe having pension/disability insurance based on danger- like they get at the moment - is on, but I don't see how we can justify giving them anything like 40% just because they do "a good job". The fatality rate is higher for bartenders than it is for firefighters, yet I don't see them on £30k a year. A 17 year old fire fighter will be earning about the same as a starting graduate in most businesses, and without the huge debt.
As to the use of the fire engines, I agree that it would be great to use them, but the simple fact is that the armed forces are not trained in their use.

[The_Farwall]

[s]Pilmour Boy wrote on 23:00, 12th Nov 2002:
but I don't see how we can justify giving them anything like 40% just because they do "a good job". The fatality rate is higher for bartenders than it is for firefighters, yet I don't see them on £30k a year.

Whilst the "its a dangerous job" thing does seem to be touted a lot by the Fire fighters supporters, the unions themselves are pushing another point much harder. That is that the job they do is not only dangerous but also highly skilled, they are asking to be paid as skilled workers when their current wage puts them much more in the manual worker range.
As for whether they deserve their pay rise, I believe they do for pretty much this reason. However, I don't believe the government should give in to their demands as a 40% lump sum rise is just a ridiculous claim to make and would be an insult to people like Nurses and other skilled public sector workers.

[hr]
"Whatever your age the desire to make plastic dolls shag is almost impossible to resist."

[Pilmour Boy]

I believe that the phrase being used is a "professional wage". If this is really waht they want, they need to agree to professional working practices. The reason that many firefighters have extra jobs is not becuase they have to, it is becuase they can, owing to the archaic shift practices in operation.

[hr] “There is a theory that if anyone figures out exactly what the universe is for and why we are here, it will be immediately replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is a similar theory that this has already happened.”

[splittter]

I don't think you'd find many firefighters arguing against changing their 'archaic' shift patterns ... however I think overall your point is less than clever ... I think we'd all be upset if we phoned the fireservice at night and got a recording cause they were off working 'professional hours' ... I can't really see how the job can be done without shift work ... if you mean hours worked a week then I believe they work 42 at the moment, which is certainly comparable with the 37.5 - 40 which is par for the course in professions.

Public sector pay has been kept artificially low for ages now ... rising at more or less inflation when private sector pay has consistently out-stripped it ... 40% for the fire-fighters in isolation seems strange, and helping them alone, or at the expense of nurses, the police, paramedics, teachers etc. would be wrong ... but for all Brown's reforms of the public sector I don't recall him promising to rectify the payment issues ... if it takes this strike to force it, then fair enough ... although interestingly some public servants are apparently worth 40% pay rises ... that'll be MPs then.

[kensson]

I believe part of the gripe is that the police get significantly higher wages, and the firefighters quite reasonably want parity with them.

[hr]My policy towards the USA remains one of regime change

[Scott]

Police aren't that well paid. According to my sources within Tayside Police, even a fully trained cop with twenty years in the job gets only about 26-27 grand a year (save in London, but then all public services in London get an extra top up on their wage to cover the cost of living.)
As for paying firefighters on how danagerous their jobs are, why not pay them on how much of their time is spent fighting fires.
Of the four days a week they work, two are night shifts. They spend three-quarters of this shift sleeping if there are not out on a call. They are the only emergency service that sleeps while getting paid their night-shift allowance and do not have to do things such as patrol or vehicle checks or all the others things that the police and Ambulance servies do at nights. If is came to a 'time in motion' study I think they'd find that they were only 'working' about half the hours they were on, and most of that is dealing with fire safety, checking hydrants and doing special services such as animal rescue.
They might only answer three or four emergency (999) calls in their four days/night on, and one or two of them might be false alarms.

[Administrator]

[s]Unregisted User Scott wrote on 15:53, 13th Nov 2002:
They are the only emergency service that sleeps while getting paid their night-shift allowance ... and more along those lines

So? You make lots of good points, but you then have to sucesfully argue that this fact means they deserve less pay. You ain't done that. I for one are perfectly happy to pay on duty fire men to sleep.


As for paying firefighters on how danagerous their jobs are, why not pay them on how much of their time is spent fighting fires.

Yay! Lets pay firemen depeding on how many fires they attend! For far better sarcastic comments than I could ever manage, go read any of Terry Pratchets asides about the guild of Firemen in his ank-morpork series of books.

James Baster

[zippy]

[s]Administrator wrote on 16:04, 13th Nov 2002:
[s]Unregisted User Scott wrote on 15:53, 13th Nov 2002:
[i]They are the only emergency service that sleeps while getting paid their night-shift allowance ... and more along those lines

So? You make lots of good points, but you then have to sucesfully argue that this fact means they deserve less pay. You ain't done that. I for one are perfectly happy to pay on duty fire men to sleep.


As for paying firefighters on how danagerous their jobs are, why not pay them on how much of their time is spent fighting fires.

Yay! Lets pay firemen depeding on how many fires they attend! For far better sarcastic comments than I could ever manage, go read any of Terry Pratchets asides about the guild of Firemen in his ank-morpork series of books.

James Baster
[/i]


why should they be entitled to as much as 30k when a university graduate in a job, who has studyed for 4 years only earns 20 ish k? i agree the fire service does a good job, but i dont think they deserve as much as 30k. they should get a payrise, that is undoubted, but why should it be as much?

[Guest]

I'm not arguing against shift working per se, but rather the way they work in the fire service. One of the main wishes of the local authorities, and as recommended in the Bain Report, is to have only one over night shift, and more flexible day shifts. As it stands, fire fighters can get eight days in a row off work, without taking any days off, simply by requesting appropriate shifts.

[immunodiffusion]

[s]Unregisted User Scott wrote on 15:53, 13th Nov 2002:
Police aren't that well paid.

Police do earn more than firefighters, and do a very comparable job. A new recruit in Fife Police earns 18,264 pounds, whereas a new recruit in the fire service is only on 17208. After 15 years service, a police constable earns 28,905 whereas a firefighter only earns 22,491. See the following links for the precise payscales: http://police.fife.net/Recruitment/poli ... bles.shtml
http://www.fbu.org.uk/pay/pay01/WTF.html

The mean graduate starting salary in the UK is currently 17,722 (see http://www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/ShowPage ... s/p!ecdLaX ) but the difference between this and firefighters pay is that graduate earnings increase massively after a few years, whereas firefighters will only be earning 22K after 15 years. The firefighters want about 30K for the top increments on the payscale only - you wouldn't find many graduates who had been sucessful in their careers for 15 years earning 22K. For example, doctors start off earning 18,585 when they graduate (only slightly more than a police recruit, and after 5-6 years at university), but the top NHS consultant salary is 90,465 (see http://classified.bmj.com/cgi-bin/section.pl?sn=salary )

Starting salaries for most professional public sector jobs start at around the same level - the difference is how much they increase as you progress in your career, and for firefighters this is not nearly enough.

[Prophet Tenebrae]

11% is a pretty reasonable offer and the fact is that the firefighters do seem to be backing themselves into a bad situation - the longer they hold off talks, the higher the death toll and eventually there is going to be such pressure from the public the firefighters will have to come back and those people will have died for what? An extra couple of percent?

[kensson]

Firstly, thanks to immunodiffusion for his/her informative post.

Secondly, my impression from the firefighters I've seen on the news and the ones with the placards outside the fire station is that they have no desire at all to be striking, but feel they have been ignored too long.

Indeed, in one incident in Wales, firefighters left the picket line to help at a house-fire, because they felt this was a call they couldn't let go unanswered.

Striking is not something anyone does lightly.

I believe in the firefighters' commitment to their work, but also that they only want fair pay for the excellent jobs they do.

[hr]My policy towards the USA remains one of regime change

[rubbermuffin]

Tony Blair's pay increase after the last election: 41% (or £47,000)

Payclaim by firefighters described as 'Scargillite' by Tony Blair: 40% (or £9000)

The firefighters deserve justice. The crapness of the army backup shows just how much they should be valued.

[Al]

Let's not call it "justice". Although firefighters are paid much less than they deserve, striking is not the way to get a rise. The only people suffering are the innocent. The government will never give the FBU 40% - they couldn't afford it. The firefighters are well aware of this, and are using it as a bargaining chip. I have one question, I wonder what would happen if, while on strike, one of the firefighters' homes was on fire. Do you think they would maintain their strike or would they break it?

[hr]"The greatest enjoyment from existence is living dangerously"

[rubbermuffin]

Al wrote on 23:13, 14th Nov 2002:

The government will never give the FBU 40% - they couldn't afford it.

Absolute bo**ocks I'm afraid - the amount this would cost wouldn't even scratch Gordon Brown's bulging coffers. The government won't give in because this is their chance to 'stand up to the unions', and show themselves for the Thatcherites they really are.

As for whether the firefighters would leave their posts if their own house was on fire - course they would, and last night they saved a man from a fireworks factory in manchester. But that has nothing to do with whether they deserve a pay rise or not.

It is the govt. who are causing the innocent to suffer by not stumping up a few quid.

[kensson]

For some perspective, to give something like 50,000 firefighters each a rise of about £9,000 would cost the government £450million - call it half a billion. The total local government budget for this year is £37.7billion. This alone would increase local government spending by 1.3%, about the same increase as it was afforded for everything last year.

Striking firefighters aren't doggedly sticking to the picket lines - they're helping out on an ad hoc basis so that the strike poses as little threat to public safety as possible.

[hr]My policy towards the USA remains one of regime change

[The_Farwall]

[s]rubbermuffin wrote on 09:47, 15th Nov 2002:
Al wrote on 23:13, 14th Nov 2002:

The government will never give the FBU 40% - they couldn't afford it.

Absolute bo**ocks I'm afraid - the amount this would cost wouldn't even scratch Gordon Brown's bulging coffers. The government won't give in because this is their chance to 'stand up to the unions', and show themselves for the Thatcherites they really are.

As for whether the firefighters would leave their posts if their own house was on fire - course they would, and last night they saved a man from a fireworks factory in manchester. But that has nothing to do with whether they deserve a pay rise or not.

It is the govt. who are causing the innocent to suffer by not stumping up a few quid.



If a may quote here - this is "Absolute bo**ocks I'm afraid". As has been pointed out numerous times, even IF the government could affoard this half-billion pound spending increase (I don't know, I haven't checked any numbers, though Kensson has and disagrees with you, and I'm inclined to believe him) the government conceding to such a massive pay rise would be bad on so many levels. For starters, it would be an insult to several other public sector workers who do just as vital, live saving jobs as the firemen and are also underpaid but haven't gone as far as striking and making demands as ridiculous as the firefighters seem to have.
The only way for the Government to be fair in this kind of action would be to give an equivalent pay rise to all it's other underpaid workers, the nurses and student-doctors and teachers and all the rest. The question really isn't whether the Government can find the half a billion to give in to the firefighter's demands, it has to be whether they can find the several billion it would cost to give everyone a fair and equivalent pay rise.
Otherwise we could be pushed into another 'Winter of discontent' as each different profession demands their fair share by striking.
The firefighters where right to use the threat, and perhaps even the reality, of strike action to make their point to the government. Where I disagree with their actions is their seeming refusal to budge from their initial demands. They need to negotiate.
When it comes down to it, it is the nature of the world that the employer sets the wage, not the employee. I don't mean to put it so bluntly and probably shouldn't reduce the matter quite so far but if the firefighters don't want to do their job for the pay they're being offered then they can go and find something with better pay. If they do want to do their job (which I suspect most do, I very much doubt anyone is in firefighting for the money) then they shouldn't be holding the government to ransom and putting lives at risk like they are.
40% is too much.