January 22, 2021 - 4:10pm
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) is being lambasted across the media today, accused in a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) of acting as an obstacle to the engagement of firefighters in the national response to the pandemic.
As ever, it is crucial to go beyond the headlines and examine the facts.
Last year, as the pandemic began to take hold, FBU leaders reached a tripartite agreement alongside fire and rescue service chiefs and local government employers that would see firefighters pitched into the front line of the response.
The agreement was ground-breaking: established industrial relations processes were streamlined to ensure firefighters could swiftly be mobilised to undertake the most critical work — work that sat well outside of their contractual role and for which many had received only the most basic training.
Firefighters soon found themselves driving ambulances, delivering food and medicines to vulnerable people, moving dead bodies, delivering PPE to NHS establishments, assembling face shields, packing food supplies, and more.
In the national interest, the FBU had demonstrated great flexibility in ratifying such a far-reaching agreement. The union’s associated demands were about safety, not money. Understandably, it insisted on the highest level of protection: “We’ll offer up our members. Just look after them,” was the FBU’s line. Not terribly unreasonable in the circumstances.
All things considered, the agreement was a shining example of how, at a time of national emergency, stakeholders with often competing interests — in this case, bosses, workers and local politicians — could come together for the greater good.
Unfortunately, tensions mounted earlier this month when service chiefs decided that one agreed safety measure — that firefighters be required to submit a negative covid-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test before returning to their fire station on normal duties — was no longer sustainable, meaning that the wider agreement was placed in jeopardy.
However, instead of seeing that point of contention as a setback to be overcome, and recognising that it should be placed in the context of the considerable good that the agreement had achieved, the inspectorate — backed up by government ministers — has used it as justification for a full-scale assault on the FBU. Its report shows little regard for the great lengths the union went to in the first place to help secure the tripartite agreement, and instead demonises it as a roadblock which is placing public safety at risk.
Disturbingly, the report seems to bemoan that the union — which, let us not forget, represents the overwhelming majority of the UK’s firefighters — should have any influence at all during the pandemic, arguing that fire and rescue service bosses should be left to make decisions “unhindered”.
Worse, it uses the impasse as a pretext for a recommendation that the entire fire and rescue service national industrial relations machinery be “reformed” in a way that would undoubtedly sideline the union.
The report is a shabby and politically-motivated piece of work that has taken the good faith of FBU members and turned it against them.
Firefighters risked their lives at Grenfell Tower, only to be made scapegoats. They could be forgiven for being aggrieved that, having gone beyond the call of duty once more, they have again been kicked in the teeth.
Paul Embery is a firefighter, trade union activist, pro-Brexit campaigner and ‘Blue Labour’ thinker
PaulEmbery
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI realise that this is not a popular topic – so boring to most people. In his recent book, ‘Despised’, Mr Embery says that (some) unions have been taken over by intellectuals who don’t necessarily have experience working in that particular field. Of course, he excludes himself. I should like to challenge him to answer a question:
During the lockdown many important areas kept going – rubbish collection, supermarkets, etc, without clearly being protected by union membership. The traditional Labour answer is to get everybody into a union so that all will be ‘protected’. But why would you want to encourage mass membership of unions if the top people were just intellectual careerists, without real experience in life?
How does this help any one in this country to prosper? In Wales, where I live and have an engineering business, it is well-documented that businesses approached the Welsh Assembly for help and were told that help would be easier to get if everybody in the business was a member of a union. Is this real life? In the Welsh Assembly the main party is Labour.
I am not a person who talks about conspiracy theories but it does look like a conspiracy coming from the extreme left of the Labour movement – to somehow destabilise all we have worked for – recent exploits at Leicester University, Mr Embery’s own loss of his childhood working class community, constant discussion of gender and race issues, culminating in changes in school curricula to eliminate history, the idea that Britain was just evil in the past and now owes something to everybody else, etc.
They want everybody in a union because unions make big donations to the Labour party of course.
This eulogy of the Union is pure agenda. Take the Teachers union (whose head of one of the biggest ones said in relation to literature ‘We have nothing to learn from Dead White Men’ (meaning the world’s top literature is discarded in one huge insane WhiteMaleist go.)) is completely out to wreck education and at the same time keep the teachers from doing their job with the excuse of covid.
I read the same thing in this article. The Firemen are in society taken as heroes who will lay their life down to serve the public, and that is High Nobility. But it appears not so. They are just Union drones, used for political aims. Firemen have no real threat of death by covid, they are by trade ready to risk all to protect the public, but the cowardly union bosses just score political power/points/money off the firemen willingness to do the right thing. From all I have seen of Unions they are pretty much wreckers and users and anti-national ideologues. Trots.
Can you provide a pointer to the source of that idiot’s quote about “dead white men”?
I am not doubting you; it is entirely plausible – such sentiments are often baked into the remarks of the increasingly dimwitted talking-heads at the BBC.
https://independentleader.c…
A few facts are always useful Paul, and in view of the grossly inadequate level of protection afforded to nhs employees the fbu can hardly be blamed for exercising some caution and insisting that the agreed testing takes place
There are laws that refer to unions, and confer status and privileges upon them. It is therefore legitimate for the government to regulate the internal workings of unions.
The government should require that statutory recognition would only accrue to unions where the higher levels of union management are populated by people who have worked for a minimum of X years in the trade of the union’s members. The duration of X is debatable; I would set it at five to ten years. Once established, this notion can be developed further to apply to political parties, to remove the possibility of someone being a ‘career politician.’
Allow me to leave aside whether the service chiefs were right or not about the Covid tests – I don’t have enough information.
This takes me back to the time when I was a shift manager in a large manufacturing company and the union was very active – so active in fact that a union official sat in on every shift change so that he could give his blessing to every decision – or not. Effectively, the union was part of the management team.
IF there is an agreement between the chiefs and the FBU to say that every decision has to be ratified by the union, then Mr Embery is correct. If not, the management team is there for a purpose and must continue as it sees fit.
nn
The danger of a site like UnHerd is that it becomes an argument of one extreme versus another, Everybody knows that he is right (I do include myself here). Perhaps the criticism should be aimed at Mr Embery’s article, which has to be biased because he represents one side of it. Then the best answer is, ‘No comment.’