[A-List] UK labour militancy & public order

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Threat to send troops across fire station picket lines
CATHERINE MacLEOD, HELEN PUTTICK and KAY JARDINE
The Herald, 15 November 2002

THE stakes were raised in the firefighters' dispute last night with
suggestions from the government that ministers were considering moves to
allow troops to use civilian fire tenders.

As the 48-hour walkout by members of the Fire Brigades Union continued, John
Prescott attacked the walkout as "wrong and unjustified" and warned that
lives were being put at risk.

Three people have died in house fires since the start of the action, and
troops have dealt with a stream of 999 calls. In Scotland, two people died
in incidents normally dealt with by firefighters.

The union said many of its members had left picket lines to deal with
emergencies, but remained solidly behind the campaign for a 40% pay rise.

The deputy prime minister said in the Commons that ministers "may have to
review many of the issues which until now we have kept off the table".

Urging firefighters' leaders to get back to the negotiating table, he said:
"We have bent over backwards to be fair and reasonable. We have been met
with action that is wrong and unjustified and puts lives at risk.

"Faced with this, the government will do what we have to do to protect the
public. I say talk - don't walk."

Mr Prescott did not expand on the implied threat, but it is widely
understood the government will consider deploying red fire engines if an
eight-day walkout goes ahead next Friday. There is also the possibility of
applying for a court injunction to stop any more planned strikes.

Downing Street announced yesterday that 15 red fire engines had been
transferred from the National Fire Training College in Gloucestershire and
were being made available to troops at various locations around the country.
The prime minister's spokesman also confirmed there were another 100 red
fire engines held in reserve.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, last night demanded that the prime
minister "needs to make absolutely clear that he will not put the sanctity
of a picket line before public safety".

Mr Duncan Smith believes the government would rather use green goddesses
than modern firefighting equipment for fear of provoking the FBU.

However, union leaders warned it would be "potentially dangerous" to allow
troops to drive civilian fire tenders because high levels of training,
spread over four years, were needed to handle the hi-tech equipment.

An FBU source said the government was resorting to "desperate measures"
instead of working to resolve the dispute and head off the series of
eight-day-long strikes. The first strike ends at 6pm tonight.

In Scotland, emergency services across the country reported that much of
their time had been taken up with hoax calls.

One man was convicted yesterday at Perth for a series of malicious calls on
Wednesday night, but the numbers of hoax calls across Scotland fell over the
course of the day.

The wife of a Scot killed in a road accident yesterday said the strike was
not responsible for her husband's death. Robin Brooks, of Stewarton, died
after his car was in collision with a lorry in Ayrshire.

In a separate incident, police confirmed a 55-year-old man died following an
accident at a railway yard in Glasgow. A number of firefighters picketing
nearby rushed to the HGV driver's aid after a load of wooden railway
sleepers collapsed on top of him.

-----

Where the firefighters have made their biggest mistake
Alf Young
The Herald, 15 November 2002

TRYING to remain objective about the rights and wrongs of this firefighters'
dispute is a tough assignment. Not nearly as tough as entering a burning
building to rescue those at risk, of course. We all instinctively agree with
the second sentence of the Bain committee's interim position paper that the
fire service's "professionalism in responding to incidents is beyond
compare". But clinging to reason in this increasingly emotionally-charged
stand-off carries its own hazards.

I am reminded of an interview I watched on Newsnight a couple of months back
conducted by the veteran commentator Charles Wheeler. Wheeler was talking to
a black law professor at, I think, Georgetown University on the outskirts of
Washington. In his youth, this soft-spoken academic had been a leading
civil- rights activist. He had suffered much for his beliefs. Reflecting on
the horrors of 9/11 one year on, the man praised the New York firefighters
who had, in their hundreds, surrendered their own lives trying to rescue
others in the twin towers.

Then he confided to Wheeler that, in acknowledging the sheer scale of that
sacrifice, he was depriving himself, as a black man, of the right to
question why the Fire Department New York remains so uniformly white, so
institutionally racist. How in the post-9/11 atmosphere, he pondered, could
he question the FDNY's closed shop which ensures that, even if you are
white, you need a family connection to get a job fighting fires in the Big
Apple?

The first UK fire strike in a quarter of a century is less than 48 hours
old, but the allegation that our own fire service is institutionally racist
has already been deployed. Worse is bound to follow, with one tabloid
already branding sections of the leadership of the Fire Brigades Union as
shameless apologists for Saddam Hussein. You don't have to believe every
flight of fancy in The Project, the BBC's recent fictionalised account of
life inside New Labour, to anticipate an increasingly brutal campaign to
damn the motives of the FBU and vilify its leadership, if its programme of
strikes escalates.

That project to swing public opinion away from the brave souls on the picket
lines will, to be blunt, become easier as the death toll during the rolling
programme of stoppages mounts. Public opinion is already deeply split on
this issue. Any swing is likely to go against the firefighters' cause and I
suspect that, in their heart of hearts, the FBU leadership knows as much.

It strikes me that the firefighters and their union have played their
negotiating hand very clumsily. For 25 years they went along with a pay
formula that was leaving their members with earnings increasingly adrift of
where they thought they should be. At the same time they jealously protected
ways of working - that much discussed shift system and what was, in effect,
an overtime ban - that opened up the space for a second job. In the early
years, after the 1977 dispute, being able to double up as a part-time
builder, mini-cab driver, or barman provided the family cream. Now, if we
are to believe what firefighters tell us, such parallel careers are vital to
make family ends meet. That all smacks of complacency and a dereliction of
union duty.

Their biggest mistake, however, was to end a quarter of a century of
acquiescence with an increasingly discredited pay-and-conditions package by
slapping down an incendiary one-off 40% catch-up claim. The FBU insists it
didn't come up with the 40% figure. But asking for £30,000 now for a fully
qualified firefighter implies a 40% increase on current rates. Given the
disparity between that and what other groups of key public-sector workers in
the NHS and education, are getting, it has been obvious from day one no
government would ever concede that. To do so would be to open the floodgates
to a wave of other catch-up claims. A government that is pumping billions
extra into our ailing public services but is determined to demonstrate that
all this extra taxpayers' money is buying better public provision, not just
millions of better-rewarded public servants, would never risk seeing its own
authority being washed away by such strings-free generosity.

Successive governments, at both national and local level, haven't played
their hands very astutely either. John Prescott insists Labour has "bent
over backwards to be fair and reasonable". But, as Bain makes clear, all the
principal stakeholders in this service - government, local authority
employers, senior management, and the unions - "must take their share of the
blame". He claims an almost total lack of real political engagement in the
service since the last strike in 1997. Worse, in the week that another
Queen's Speech reveals another rather threadbare legislative programme at
Westminster, Bain describes the 1947 Act which still governs the fire
service as "hopelessly outdated".

However if, as he also argues, a radical programme of reform is needed to
turn the fire service into a modern institution, do Sir George and his two
colleagues on the independent review really think that can be achieved by
offering just 4% this year in exchange for a whole raft of modernisations,
including new shift patterns, mixed crewing of appliances, and voluntary
overtime? If, as his report claims, the professionalism of firefighters is
"beyond compare", why is the first major tranche of radical reform worth
little more than the going rate in the rest of the public sector?

Deciding who should be paid what in a society as complex as ours is not, has
never been, and never will be a purely rational process. Our firefighters
feel increasingly undervalued for the job they do. But so does Bulgarian
international mid-fielder Stilian Petrov, knocking along on a reported £6000
a week at Celtic Park, but looking to double or triple that if he is to stay
beyond 2005. Petrov can always walk away at the end of his current contract
or hope to be sold to a higher-paying club before then. But, similarly, so
can disgruntled firefighters.

That's the other main weakness in their negotiating position. A lot more
people want to join the fire service than want to leave it. Even in the
public sector, pay rates are going to be influenced, in part, by the laws of
supply and demand. I've no doubt firefighters go into the business out of a
sense of being able to make what occasionally proves to be a radical
difference to the lives of others. But there are other attractions,
including pension provisions which are increasingly the envy of private
sector workers worried if they'll be left with any occupational pension at
all.

Yes, firefighters pay 11% of their salary for the privilege of retiring at
50 on two-thirds of final salary. There are millions of workers in other
industries who would jump at such a deal. They won't, I suspect, be cheering
the firefighters on if, by Christmas, the strikes are still running and the
death toll is in the hundreds.