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U.S. Response I: Firefighters Demand Labor Rights By Greg Seigle “We need our government to ensure we have the training and the resources to prepare our nation’s first responders to defend our communities when the next terrorist attack occurs,” Association President Harold Schaitberger told 800 firefighters gathered for an annual association conference here. Schaitberger said Senate Republicans have “double-crossed” emergency personnel by denying recent attempts to pass legislation that would provide them the right to negotiate as a group. Schaitberger vowed to punish Senate opponents such as Minority Whip Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Senate Republican Party Policy Committee Chairman Larry Craig (R-Idaho), whom he accused of leading a late charge last fall to narrowly defeat the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act. The bill failed to pass after it fell four votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, according to firefighter association spokesman George Burke. The measure would have given firefighters the right to collectively bargain over workplace issues such as hours, wages and working conditions. “Let me say here and now, Senator Nickles, Senator Craig and all elected officials who demean our profession, attack our union and undermine our agenda — we are coming after you,” Schaitberger said. “We won’t back down, and we don’t care if the polls or odds are against us. Win or loss, you will know you’ve been in a fight. We will make our point, and we will prevail.” While Schaitberger briefly praised President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge for directing an unprecedented $3.5 billion toward first responders in the White House’s proposed fiscal 2003 budget, a thousand-fold increase from this year, he unleashed a blistering verbal assault on lawmakers (see GSN, March 6). Since Sept. 11, he said, Republicans such as Nickles and Craig have been publicly praising firefighters while also quietly fighting to deny them the bargaining rights offered to most other federal and private U.S. employees. “For more than three decades, I have heard too many politicians, too many times, pay too much lip service to our profession and pay too little attention to our need for meaningful action to keep our members safe and secure,” Schaitberger said. “We don’t need any more politicians praying for our lost souls. We don’t need any more homilies. We don’t need any more political candidates seeking out photo ops. We don’t need any more speeches about heroism,” he continued. “We need our elected officials to cut the crap and take real action.” Firefighters Seek Hiring Binge In addition to the right to collectively bargain, the association — which lobbies on behalf of 240,000 firefighters in the United States and Canada — wants the federal government to hire 75,000 more firefighters over the next five to seven years. The funding for such mass hires should be “completely separate” from the $3.5 billion earmarked for first responders in next year’s budget request, most of which will be needed for preparedness equipment and training for weapons of mass destruction, said Burke, the association spokesman (see GSN, Dec. 11, 2001). “The greatest need facing the fire service today is adequate staffing,” said Schaitberger. “At the end of the day, no matter what fancy equipment, training and technology are available to our people, it takes firefighters to go into action” if a WMD incident occurs. “It is a disgrace that two-thirds of this nation’s fire departments are inadequately staffed,” he added. “The bottom line is that we need more fire fighters. “I am sick and tired of hearing that firefighter staffing is only a local issue,” he continued. “Providing the resources, the money, to help hire firefighters is a federal government responsibility and we are going to make damn sure that Congress accepts and shoulders that responsibility. Our country would never send its army into battle at two-thirds strength, so why on Earth would they ask our nation’s domestic defenders to operate with inadequate staffing?” Schaitberger, who served 10 years with the Fairfax County Fire Department in Virginia, said that firefighters are often overlooked in federal budgets that sometimes include bonuses for states or local jurisdictions to hire police, teachers and other public servants. Congress rarely includes supplemental funds for boosting the ranks of firefighters, he said. “If it’s good enough to provide federal dollars for more law enforcement, if it’s good enough to provide federal dollars for more teachers, then I’m here to tell you that it’s good enough to provide federal dollars for more of us,” he told the audience, many of whom are fanning out across Capitol Hill today to lobby their respective representatives. Long Battle Ahead For decades firefighters and other first responders have waged an unsuccessful campaign to bargain collectively, but now that so much praise and attention has been heaped on them by federal officials after Sept. 11, “our day has come,” Schaitberger said. Firefighters, he said, are “not going to stop until the Congress and the administration responds” to their demands to collectively bargain and hire 75,000 firefighters. “We are going to be relentless until we get action on the issues our members deserve. … We will not tolerate equivocation, excuses or cowardice, and we will not take no for an answer.” There is no law that allows emergency personnel, including firefighters, to collectively bargain, according to Burke. Schaitberger said they simply want the rights afforded to most other U.S. workers, including most federal employees. “Even after Sept. 11, two-faced politicians attempted to curry favor with kind words and false praise while undermining our agenda and attacking our character,” Schaitberger said. At the one-month anniversary of the attacks, Senator Nickles attended a Capitol Hill news conference honoring firefighters. “At the same moment in time, this same senator had the nerve to work every angle to deny collective bargaining rights to tens of thousands of our members, while gloating over his victory in making Oklahoma a ‘right to work for less’ state,” Schaitberger said. Senator Craig, Schaitberger said, circulated a policy statement to Senate Republicans a few days before the vote on the bill suggesting they vote against the measure. He said Craig and others have expressed concern that if firefighters have the right to collectively bargain, they might use this political leverage at inopportune times — perhaps even go on strike in the advent of a WMD attack. “What rubbish, what trash, what hypocrisy,” Schaitberger said, adding that firefighters would never strike in such a dire instance.
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