One more last working class hero

firefighters a formal education is actually a disadvantage. Examples of this are shown by the way firefighters
denigrate their ‘academic’ officers and elevate firefighters’ hands-on working class masculinity: a masculinity they
celebrate with their colleagues and also with the tacit approval of most of the community they serve. In fact, it is almost
essential that ‘others’ recognise firefighters’ masculinity for it to be successful.
Firefighters’ resistance emerges as the combined will of a collective of individual firefighters who are constructing
their masculinity at work (both past and present). Fire Service culture and joint understandings appear larger than that of
any individual constituent. My suggestion is that firefighters’ resistance to management is only successful because they
have public support and a common cause. Firefighters resist locally as a watch and nationally as firefighters and it is
possible to see firefighters conservatively protecting themselves as a class in itself. It is also possible to see this situation
as being facilitated because of the Vanguard of firefighters who act with revolutionary class consciousness as a class for
itself (see Giddens 1982; Segars 1989; Crompton 1998; Grint 1998) to provide the umbrella of the FBU for all
firefighters’ resistance. However, the price of freedom from managers’ iron cage, may the acceptance of another iron
cage, as the individual is ‘forced to fit-in’ with other individuals, albeit (and specifically) their own peer group.
Whilst it is possible to argue that firefighters are improving the product/service the public receive by their
resistance, firefighters’ resistance is not a ‘compliance’ in the terms Collinson (1992) argues about ‘commodified forms of
labour’. Firefighters may appear to be legitimising the official hierarchy, when they doff the cap to their officers.
However, they do so in the knowledge that they can marginalise officers’ influence once they are out of sight. In behaving
this way firefighters avoid the vicious circle of elite control, where managers turn workers resistance into a company asset
by colonising informal cultures into formal ones (see Strangleman and Roberts 1999). It may be that once again
firefighters are going in a different direction to the rest of the community 216 . Until the 1960’s any informal culture
firefighters had appears to have been colonised by fire service tradition (see Chapter 1). This may explain why
firefighters’ conditions were so bad, because they were caught in a vicious circle of control (see Collinson, 1992).
However, that colonisation required firefighters and officers to have joint understandings, mainly about their professional
ethos: to provide an efficient service for the public. When firefighters became aware that officers were breaking that ethos
(by attempting to deskill and cut the fire service in direct opposition to firefighters’ attempts to improve their service and
their own conditions), the scales might not have fallen from most firefighters’ eyes 217 , but they became sufficiently angry
to break with tradition and to kick-start their resistance 218 . From that point on, the relations between firefighters and
officers became increasingly difficult. Firefighters became increasingly aware how much they (and the public) stood to
lose. It is even possible to argue that currently firefighters’ operating through their informal hierarchy may have turned
everything upside down. Firefighters may be effectively colonising official structures to maintain an efficient fire service
at point of delivery (which both the public and firefighters argue for). Interestingly, in being able to protect The Job,
firefighters are also protecting the way they form their masculinity and the ‘others’ that help them to do this (with all that
this can mean for firefighters and the public).
Firefighters’ job security has not just happened; firefighters have made it happen by organising through the FBU.
But that is not the whole story, because many public service workers have organised in a similar way and not had
firefighters’ success. I consider that one reason for this is that government have not felt they will achieve sufficient
financial savings (when balanced against the cost to them in votes that they might lose) to make it worthwhile taking on
this popular group of workers 219 . It may be that the FBU leadership and class conscious militant members act as a
Vanguard, which mixes the cocktail of public support and firefighters’ militancy. But when the public recognise the
firefighter as a hero who rescues them from fire, they do so because it is firefighters who have supported this image.
Therefore, firefighters’ active development of their own status with the public has dividends. It allows them to
retain control over how they get-in and in turn construct their masculinity. In this context, it is also necessary to explain
why those firefighters without revolutionary class-consciousness are so prepared to stand under the FBU umbrella.
Firefighters’ masculinity and the watch that helps them achieve/provide their masculinity, is integral to their
understandings of themselves and the world. Mixed in with this arrangement is the way that firefighters test themselves as
an object who can achieve what the ‘others’ (the public and perhaps even officers 220 ) cannot, the standards of a good
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216 I would like to refer back to something I said earlier: “This ability is what firefighters believe sets them apart, even as special, from the ‘others’ who
run out of the buildings they go into.”
217 And revealed to firefighters what was their real relationships with officers as representatives of capital and encouraged the revolutionary
consciousness necessary for all firefighters to organise publicly as a class for itself, to generating the committed social relations through which change
could be realised.
218 Giddens (1979: 6) understands that even the weakest actors in a relationship are capable of resistance. This notion is not new and Goffman (1961)
had shown that some of the weakest members of our society can and do resist total control. It may be that firefighters were in a similar relationship with
their officers because of the military discipline in the fire service.
219 It has to be remembered that firefighters operate in all areas of the country and might be expected to gather the same level of support ‘everywhere’.
They are not a group of workers who gather support in an industrial heartland.
220 It may be helpful if I were to repeat an argument made in part in this chapter and throughout this thesis. Firefighters might define others, as those who
cannot do The Job, to include the officers who have left their ranks and given up their joint understandings about professional ethos. Before the new
requirement to wear BA at all incidents, officers led firefighters when they got in at fires (see Chapters 1, 3 and 5). This gave officers’ respect and
authority, since firefighters relied on officers’ skills, as good firefighters, to protect them. Officers now have a management role outside of fires and this
has two effects. First, officers no longer have the opportunity to ‘prove’ to firefighters, by leading them into a fire that they have the embodied
experiential expertise to be considered good firefighters: officers have been deskilled. Second, firefighters have re-skilled as a consequence, have
developed their own expertise when getting-in and no longer have to rely on officers. The result, firefighters marginalise officers as desk-workers who