One more last working class hero

o equal opportunities;
o deskilling and cuts.
6. as a struggle about the way firefighters (and perhaps officers) construct their masculinity.
All these six examples are visible throughout the report and in particular Chapter 5. However, I would like to briefly
discuss how I see the last three. Example 4, which suggests that officers might be acting to help capital almost in false
consciousness, is not a view that I particularly support. I prefer to see the difficulty between firefighters and officers as
closely related to a power struggle between two groups, which might both be trying to construct their masculinity in the
same environment. In particular, points 5 and 6 indicate there are areas that officers would control and where firefighters
might understand that officers are trying to steal their masculinity from them (see Chapters 3-5).
The report will also explain that any difficulties firefighters have with their officers are made worse and
firefighters’ resistance more vehement, because officers were once working class firefighters who have become upwardly
mobile. In so doing officers have left behind their manual skills, blue-collars and their shared understanding that they
supported whilst they were firefighters. For firefighters, this means that officers have lost their status as firefighters and
whilst officers might dispute this (another cause for difficulty), officers are in the course of establishing a new status by
proving they can order firefighters about. One way officers may justify this is to now interpret efficiency in economic
rather than in service terms. Officers can then ‘prove’ their authority by attempting to deskill and cut the fire service to
improve its ‘economic’ efficiency (in what might appear as a marriage with capital see Chapters 5 and 6) 88 .
There is also a further site for difficulty between firefighters and officers and this is recognised in Chapter 5. In
more recent years firefighters’, who were almost exclusively a white, working class, male, group, have found their
masculinity under challenge by officers forcing ‘others’, in particular women, on them as firefighters 89 . This has been a
basis of considerable difficulty in the fire service, because firefighters’ masculinity was previously constructed on the
premise that it was only available to (white) men. Therefore, firefighters’ reaction to women might appear as a
conservative defence of the petty dividend of masculinity and I hope this report will have considerable impact in
developing this area of thinking.
21
1.11.5. Looking at a way forward
Despite the increasing weight of debate that continues to make visible the politics of gender division, there remains at least
one area that may confuse and hinder equality in the fire service. This relates to the commonsense notion that only men
can achieve the embodied standards of masculinity required to be a firefighter, which in turn perpetuates the gender
division of labour in
the fire service. The outcome has been that when women apply to join the fire service, male firefighters have taken the
view women are unlikely to achieve the masculine standards a firefighter requires. This has led to the marginalisation and
harassment of those women. What then occurs is that male firefighters’ behaviour is seen as a challenge, not only to equal
opportunities, but also to officers’ authority. Officers then, their authority on the line, take an approach that dictates,
rather than investigates, how to solve the problem. This has resulted in some heavy-handed solutions, which might miss
88 In effect, firefighters see officers as defectors from firefighters’ professional ethos, which firefighters believe was a joint understanding. Similar
outcomes occur in engineering when a shop-floor worker moves into management (see Burawoy, 1976: Collinson 1992, 1994, 1996; Chapter 5).
Hollway and Jefferson (2000), illustrates a similar effect in families, which in many ways might apply to the fire service. Their account indicates that
one family member, Tommy, believes he gains respect on his council estate by holding true to norms, which he values as important. His sister, Kelly,
does not respect Tommy’s norms, and has moved away from the family and the council estate. In doing this, she challenges the source of Tommy’s
values, values that Tommy believes she held and he sees her as a traitor. Hearn (1994) too, has a similar view, which suggests that men who use profeminist
auto-critique to ‘make visible the invisible way that men subordinate women’, may also be seen as traitors.
89 Salaman’s, (1986) study of station officers’ (WO’s) resistance to equal opportunities in the fire service, particularly the imposition of female
firefighters, provides an interesting view of why the fire service resisted female firefighters. Amongst the ‘discoveries’ that Salaman made were that
station officers (watch-commanders) do not trust their senior officers. This he explains as a form of jealousy, because firefighters (who eventually
become officers) start from a similar background and qualification to their senior officers. Therefore, watch-commanders explain their “relative failure”
(Salaman 1986: 52) at not achieving senior rank by suggesting, not that the successful senior officer is more competent, but that they have achieved their
senior rank by devious means. I have difficulty in accepting Salaman’s view as representing anything like a full explanation, although I can see why his
limited study led to that conclusion. His considerations have some merit, particularly when he argues that firefighters form an occupational community:
a view that Hart, (1982: 160-182) took (although Salaman does not acknowledge Harts’ work). However, Salaman writes as if the bitter resentment that
watch-commanders have for senior officers was new. There is a considerable history (see FBU 1960; Hart 1982: 94, 161; Segars 1989; Bailey 1992) of
resistance to senior officers by firefighters and their watch-commanders. It is also possible to suggest that having ‘discovered’ an occupational
community in the fire service, Salaman might have noticed (because it is unlikely that anyone in the fire service would have told him) that there is a clear
separation between what watches and senior officer would understand as their occupational community. This might have a ‘knock on effect’ to prevent
many watch-commanders from seeking promotion, because they might not wish to leave their watch and their life as firefighters behind. Rather than
hold bitter resentment for officers who had been more ‘successful’ than them, it might even be that watch-commanders could also consider that by
increasing their hours (from 42 a week to 72 a week) they ‘sell themselves and their family for promotion’ (partly because many of these extra hours
involve being on call from home). Salaman’s failure also to acknowledge the importance of senior officers’ ‘scabbing' during firefighters’ strike
(1977/1978) is almost a careless neglect. Particularly, when senior officers’ actions at that time may have been a direct result of the hostility between
them and watches. On the one hand, there were the striking firefighters/watch-commanders and on the other hand, the senior officers who supported the
government by training and leading the troops brought into fight fires, and as firefighters suggested at that time, ‘senior offices ‘suddenly’ became aware
of their duty to the public’.