Firemen are heroes. Every boy knows that. Many will at some point in their lives will want to climb aboard that fire engine and be someone whose job is saving lifes. The fire service is one public service that does not have to worry about recruits. For every available job as a firefighter there are 40 applicants. Everyone loves a firefighter. Except it appears Tony Blair and the New Labour government. If our Prime Minister was looking for a fight with one of the unions it seems as though he could hardly have chosen a worse one. The firefighters have a large amount of public sympathy, they do a vital job and it was difficult to see how 17,000 military personnel equipped with out of date ‘Green Goddesses’ could possibly do the work that Britain’s 55,000 full time, highly equipped and trained firefighters normally do. And yet it appears that Mr Blair has won and that the firefighters have lost both the strike and the battle for public opinion. Why?

Yours truly has no particular brief for New Labour. Nor am I impressed with those who argue that strikes per se are immoral or wrong. Sometimes they are necessary and justified. But in this instance there is no question that it is wrong and immoral for the firefighters to strike. Why? Because as Mr Sheridan (Tommy to his fans) continually reminds us the firefighter’s job is to ‘save lifes’. Therefore if a firefighter withdraws their labour they are de facto refusing to save lifes. Some argue that the firemen should have a right to strike. That argument does not hold water. The police, as an essential service, are not allowed to strike and neither should the firefighters be. And what about the right not to strike? What would happen to any firefighter who was convicted that they could not strike and wanted to go into work? The intimidation and bitterness within the macho FBU is such that any person making that stance might as well resign their job and move home. The experience from the last fire strike was sufficient to ensure that Fire Brigade chiefs this time round did not encourage ‘strike breaking’. And what is this nonsense about picketing fires stations? What is the purpose of that if not to deny life saving equipment to the armed forces? It is not as though the fire engines are the personal property of the firefighters – they belong to the State and the State surely has the right to use them in order to save lifes. To argue Union Law and treat this as though this is some kind of industrial dispute is to both demean the work that the firefighters do and to endanger human life. It is difficult to see how this can be justified in any circumstances never mind as a means for bargaining for more money. Of course we would expect that most firemen would turn out if there was a major fire which resulted in danger to human life. However it is difficult to see how any fire in a building in which human beings either live or work, can be anything other than a danger to life. From a Christian perspective the firefighters lost all moral suasion, whatever their economic case, when they decided to use people’s lives as bargaining counters.

But what about the economic case? Does the fact that the firefighters have taken such desperate measures not indicate that they are in desperate straights? One of the major reasons that the Firefighters have been losing the battle for public opinion is that their working practices and conditions have been coming under increasing scrutiny.

The first mistake the Fire Brigades Union made was to make a demand for a 40% wage increase. This was compounded when it was made public that this would mean a salary of £30,000 per year. Yours truly was further astounded when I heard a fireman’s wife crying on the radio that her husband was doing two jobs and unless he got more money she would have to go out to work as they struggled to live on the two wages he brought home. Two jobs? How was that possible? Because of the shift system that firefighters operate under. It is a 2-2-4 system.. Even then we need to be careful when we say work. Night shift at least means that the firefighters are on call. This means that they can sleep, watch videos etc whilst on night shift until they are called out. That is they work two days on (8am to 6pm), two nights on (6pm to 8am) and four days off. There is no overtime because the firefighters obviously need time to recover from their normal work. This does not seem to stop an increasing number taking on second jobs (lorry drivers, taxi drivers etc). Then we discovered that the firefighters have the most generous pension scheme of any public sector workers and our sympathy began not only to evaporate but turn to envy. Little wonder that there is such a demand for firefighters jobs.

The term ‘modernisation’ has been heard a lot in discussion of this dispute. The FBU have argued that this means a drastic cut in jobs and one suspects that they may be right. However there is a sense in which they have brought this on to their own heads and played right into the governments hands. As this dispute has progressed the information coming out about the firefighters practices has been quite disturbing. One of the most disturbing facts is that the FBU have refused to allow firefighters to be trained as paramedics. This means that firefighters who are often first at the scene of a tragedy have no medical instruction other than the most basic first aid course. The FBU has also imposed the rule that all firefighters should be paid the same, regardless of their skills. They have also defended the practice of four days on and four off whilst refusing to allow firefighters to work more than one hour of overtime.

All this may be true but surely the firefighters deserve as high a wage as they can get because do they not risk their lifes for the rest of us? Are these not the heroes who enter burning buildings which everyone else is running from? Well yes and no. The firefighters job is to save lifes and there are those who have been particularly heroic and have given their lifes in that cause. But the modern fire service is very different from what most of us imagined. Modern equipment and practices means that being a fireman is actually a lot less dangerous than being a lorry driver, farm worker or refuse collector. Yes you read it correctly. If you are a lorry driver (average wage £18,073) you are twice as likely to be killed in the course of your work than if you are a fireman. If you are a farm worker (£15,637) it is one and a half times. Refuse collectors (£16,545), road workers (£20,343), builders (£19,262) and window cleaners (£13,074) are all more likely to lose their lifes in the course of their work than a firefighter. Other groups of workers are in far more precarious jobs – scaffolders (£23,879) are four times more likely to lose their lifes, Merchant sailors (£31,190) ten times, and fishermen (£15,322) a staggering 17 times (Source: Department of Public Health, University of Oxford and the Office of National Statistics). The average firefighter earns £23,343. They are hardly at the top of the ladder when it comes to risk nor is it the case that they are the bottom of the ladder when it comes to money.

Meanwhile the armed forces with their outdated equipment have been managing well. As each day of the strike has gone by they have demonstrated that the job can be done by them. Firefighters are in a privileged position. They do not require University training and therefore do not have the crippling student debts that most people have run up. They have excellent working conditions and good pay. Perhaps there is a case for arguing that there pay should be increased. But please let the Left forget the nonsense about this being some great working class struggle where the underprivileged and the poor take on the mighty and the wealthy. Make no mistake about it. If the firefighters were to get their way it would be the poor and the weak who would suffer. Those who could get wage rises (because of their political and economic power) would get them – those who have relatively little bargaining power will find that they are left behind in the resulting inflationary spiral. Of course we can argue that politicians pay themselves well and of course we can also argue that there are people who earn a whole lot more than the firefighters and yet do not deserve it. But unless we are suddenly to have a utopian society where the dustman gets paid the same as the Fat Cat property speculator then in the world that we live in, to give the firefighters what they demand, would be a recipe for chaos and further injustice. Let us assume that the firefighters were to get their £30,000 and all other public service workers were to get 40% increases do we really think that the firefighters would be satisfied with their new wage? Not a chance! They would want their pay differentials to be reestablished (they after all should be paid what they are worth in their own eyes – which is more than a nurse, dustbin man, farm workers) and their increase would have been eaten away by inflation so they would need £40,000. Thus it continues.

From a Christian perspective, whatever the ins and outs of the economic and political arguments it is surely a matter of concern that our society, whether at top or bottom, is increasingly dominated by the love of Mammon. Whether it is men prepared to go on strike and endanger others lifes in order to get more money for themselves, or whether it is the property speculator of stock broker looking to make as fast a buck as possible, all are culpable. Until we realize that life is more than what we can buy then there is little chance that concepts of public service, social equality and justice will be anything more than ‘buzz’ words for politicians and religious teachers.

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