One more last working class hero

However, officers are not so much representing capital when they try to cut and deskill the fire service, they are more
likely using this as an opportunity to ‘prove’ their masculinity by confirming they can control firefighters.
However, if officers were to be successful and reduce the size of the fire service then this would inevitably affect
the way firefighting is currently done by getting-in. This would reduce firefighters ability to test themselves as good
firefighters, which in turn removes the central tenet to firefighters achieving their masculinity. I have already described
how this reflexive process works, but in class terms, when officers try to cut the fire service, it may be wrong to see
firefighters’ resistance as just about money or job stability. It is also about the dividend of firefighters’ masculinity. Were
officers able to cut The Job, then firefighters’ whole sense of being might be at stake. In so much as it is possible to
theorise about firefighters in class terms, I see firefighters’ acting through their informal hierarchies as if they were a class
of men in competition with their officers, who are another class of men intent on gaining their masculinity in the same
area: these relations are therefore antagonistic.
Firefighters’ informal hierarchies are not new; they existed long before I joined the fire service. However, in
earlier times firefighters’ hierarchies have worked more closely alongside (colonised within) the formal structures of the
fire service. More recently an increasing awareness, brought about by frustration at their conditions of service, provided
firefighters with the initiative to flex their industrial muscle. As a result the FBU demanded and got during the 1960’s:
• better pay and a reduction in hours;
• brigades brought up to their staffing establishment;
• a radical change in their working arrangements, particularly the reduction in their cleaning duties;
• their duties to be seen in a more professional light, especially by the introduction of FP.
During these disputes relations between senior officers and firefighters soured. Possibly firefighters became more aware
that alleged joint understandings between them and officers (see Chapter 5) were not joint at all. That officers had their
own agendas, which all the time officers were serving by allowing firefighters to believe they shared their understandings.
Whatever the reason, firefighters increasingly withdrew the respect they had previously given to senior officers. As
resistance became more entrenched, firefighters increased their demands for a safer fire service and senior officers once
again opposed firefighters. The FBU again made demands and got from the 1970’s onwards:
• an increase in crew sizes;
• the increasing provision and use of BA;
• improved uniforms for firefighting.
As we saw in Chapter 1, not all firefighters were happy at the increasing use of BA, because one way that firefighters
‘prove’ themselves was through their ability to be seen as ‘smoke-eaters’. However, this resistance only lasted until those
firefighters found that BA actually increased their ability to get-into a fire and provided another way to ‘prove’ their
masculinity. The increased use of BA had two further outcomes, which again reduced firefighters respect for officers
because:
• officers (who could not wear BA and stay in control of the fire) had to stay outside;
• lacking officers’ ‘expertise’ inside the building, firefighters had to reskill and organise their own safety protocols.
Nevertheless it is still difficult to fully understand why firefighters and senior officers found themselves on opposite sides
of the industrial fence during the firefighters’ strike of 1978-9. However, they did and now there seems no going back.
Despite so many attempts to bring the sides together and Burchill (2000) is the latest, it appears that somewhere in the
country disputes are always at the point of starting. In class terms, this is a classic antagonism and whilst capitals’ and
officers’ interests are both being served by officers attempting to control firefighters, officers and capital exist in a
marriage of convenience (see Hartmann 1981).
For whatever reason, firefighters’ militancy exists very much in an environment whereby firefighters increasingly
organise to ‘save’ The Job from senior officers who attempt to reduce the cost of the fire service. Compared with other
industries firefighters have been successful; the fire service remains more or less intact and there have been no compulsory
redundancies. To date firefighters’ job security may be the reason why they have not gone the way of those engineers
who have had to look outside of their work for their masculinity, or by setting themselves apart in competition with their
work colleagues (Collinson 1992: 181-182). Firefighters have maintained their status collectively and it is important to
note that the decision by their union to insist that every firefighter can do every job and that no extra pay is available for
‘qualifications’ has served firefighters well. Firefighters were flexible specialists (before the term was used by Piore and
Sabel 1984). Firefighters are a community of (almost) equals who cooperate to ‘produce the goods’. Firefighters’
requirement that they share their skills (after an initial selection) may be an early example of quality circles (Osterman
1995). If there is any competition amongst firefighters, it is a competition to include everyone: to ensure everyone has the
protocols necessary to be a good firefighter and become a safe working colleague 215 . This has given them the solidarity to
stay together (fight capital) and currently firefighters are so secure in their job and confident about their masculinity that
they do not blame the system, or lack of education for their position (see Collinson 1992). It sometimes appears that to
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215 It may well be a worthwhile lever for change if the FBU were to point out that if male firefighters do not soon accept that women are part and parcel
of their hierarchy that they may well get into the sort of competition that causes labour to take its eye off of capital.