Question:
The doubters who have been asking what we will be giving for the extra dosh have been given the standard 'burning baby' stuff. But I would like to point out some more thoughts on this. Our pay scale was decided 25 years ago. In those days we put out fires, and there were plenty of them. We also provided other special services as we do today, but with much less knowledge and much inferior equipment. But that was pretty much what we did. We ran to the scene after the event. Reactive. Today things are different. In the last 10 years or so the fire safety legislation that we enforced under laws such as the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises act, the Fire Services Act and others has sucessfully reduced the amount of fire damage and death in industry by radical amounts. With heavy machinery, chemicals, solvents, paints, foams, furnaces, presses... you get it... industry should be a dangerous place. It still is, if you ignore the safety rules that we try to enforce. But deaths in industry have now dropped so low that it has been shown that now more people die in the home than in industry. Of course, it's not just fire deaths, H&S act etc impinges on the stats as well, but for this discussion its fire deaths that are relevant. So this fact having been observed by the powers that be, what else can WE do? Well we can't just sit back and wait for an incident to happen anymore. We have to be Proactive (Dontyalove the buzzwords) and try to prevent them from happening in the first place. OK, so you want more productivity from us? In the last two years the focus in the Fire Service has changed from reactive to proactive. The phrase is now Community Fire Safety and we now have so many different schemes in place to attempt to reduce the numbers that it's dificult to list them. In no particular order... The SAVED (Smoke Alarms for the Vunerable, Elderly and Disabled) scheme. Child Fire Awareness Scheme. Fire Cadets. Electric Blanket testing. Local statistical analysis of incidents. Demonstrations at public events. Leafleting the streets local to a fire incident. Dedicated schools teams. ORIS (Operational Risk Information System). Various seasonal schemes. Off the top of my head here at home I don't have the details. But I hope someone will join in and show what they are doing too. In my brigade the word fire has just been dropped from the phrase, as we are aiming at Community Safety in general now. We have just had the front of one fire station turned into a shopfront to try to encourage the public to come in to us with any questions. More are planned. The point is that in Engineering, you make widgets. Be they bridges or nails, you make an end product that (hopefully) makes a profit. In the Fire service we don't make a financial profit. Our profit is more people living than otherwise would have been. The only way we can measure 'productivity' is in the number of dead and injured that we attend to. We are putting in to place, right now, new methods to try to reduce these figures. Anything goes. If someone thinks of an idea it's considered, no matter how batty it seems at first. This is the increase in productivity you are looking for... our reason for saying we are worth the increase to catch up to our old standards. All the other arguments about our hours, standards etc. still stand. Yes, there are others who do similar hours, similar nights, etc. But they are still the minority of employees in the UK. It might be worth asking the postie or the milkie the answer to this... how many people are trying to sleep during the day after a night shift? It will vary to the area of course, if you have a car plant on the doorstep it will be higher. But in general terms it's still a low percentage of the population. So, discuss. And please folks, keep it polite! We get nothing from calling names.

Answer: At last, some decent information. Thank you Mike. The only point of issue is that while they may technically be in the minority, you should not underestimate the number of people who work long, unsocial hours and difficult shift patterns. I don't think that the FF's will be doing there claim any justice by quoting hours and shifts as a justification for additional pay - I personally think it will get people's back's up! I work in excess of 45 hours per week every week, I get called out of my bed, I get no overtime pay, when I go abroad I can work up to 16 hours a day, I don't get paid while traveling and I claim working families tax credit to look after my wife and baby. Don't get me wrong, I'm not moaning because this is quite normal in engineering. Although we make widgets, these widgets are made 24 hours-a-day every day of the year as productivity is carefully planned to maximise profit. Most manufacturers operate 3 shift systems so there are always approximately 20% of the workforce on nights at any one time. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that all FF's are hard done by and work long hours - you will only alienate a large proportion of the population, like myself, who are working just as hard and just as long.