Fighting fires – firefighter organising in the UK

Abstract

8 | International Union Rights | 26/1 FOCUS | UNION RIGHTS OF STATE ADMINISTRATION AND ESSENTIAL SERVICES WORKERS Fighting fires – firefighter organising in the UK Last year, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) celebrated our centenary as the representative voice of firefighters across the UK. Our celebration was cause for much reflection on our role at home and internationally in developing our service and protecting our members. One hundred years ago organising firefighters into trade unions was heavily proscribed in the UK. There were hundreds of small local brigades, with almost half within police fire brigades and therefore closed to trade unionism. National funding and national standards were nonexistent . Poorly funded local arrangements meant fragmented services according to luck and circumstance, rather than risk. Firefighters’ generally lived and worked at their fire station, often for shifts of 100 hours a week. They were paid a pittance. The ‘Fireman’s Trade Union’ (FTU) was formed in 1918, during the great drive to unionise workers that swept through much of the industrialised world. The union would struggle to recruit more than a few thousand members in its early years. It was initially denied the right to bargain collectively and to strike. But the union allied itself with the wider trade union movement and affiliated to the Labour Party during the 1920s. It fought to establish a national legislative framework for firefighting during the 1930s and organised the influx of auxiliaries drafted into the fire service before and during the Second World War, leading to a significant growth in membership and influence. This enabled the FBU to play a central role in shaping the post-war fire service architecture. The union was instrumental in establishing collective bargaining on pay and conditions through the National Joint Council in 1947 – a body that exists to this day. We also supported the national stakeholder forum, the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council (CFBAC), established at the time and which oversaw improvements for the next half century. The union won national standards of fire cover and campaigned for better equipment and training for firefighters. The union took its first industrial action, the spit-and-polish work to rule in the early 1950s and its first national strike action in 1977, winning a pay formula and a 42-hour week. The union established high levels of membership density in the industry – around 90 percent – which has been crucial in making and defending gains. The neoliberal turn The FBU has faced relentless attacks on our right to organise over the past forty years, starting with the Thatcher administration in 1979. Successive governments have threatened to roll back our fire and rescue service through cuts, reorganisation and antiunion legislation. Chief fire officers tried to get firefighters exempted from health and safety legislation, while central government attacked national standards of fire cover, building regulations and other fire safety matters. Ministers tried in vain to introduce privatisation into our public service, meeting a robust response from the union at every turn. Sadly the advent of Tony Blair’s new Labour government in 1997 did not improve the situation. In fact that administration weakened fire safety law, torn up the national framework, scrapped much of the national infrastructure for fire safety standards (such as the CFBAC) and tried to impose a regional fire control model. The FBU fought a bitter battle to increase firefighters’ pay in 2002-03 and faced outrageous attacks from leading Labour ministers. The union also fought many local battles, including taking strike action to defend local services. The last decade has seen the fire and rescue service in the UK battered by the economic downturn and by central government austerity. The Tory-led governments since 2010 have reduced central funding by more than 40 percent, cutting one-in-five firefighter jobs in the process and damaging national resilience to fire and other hazards firefighters tackle. This unprecedented austerity was part of making workers’ pay for a crisis we did not cause. That struggle continues today. Austerity Britain The Tory-led Westminster government launched an assault on public sector pensions, seeking to make millions of workers including firefighters pay more, work longer and still receive less when they retire. The FBU has fought a...