210 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
only firefighters and police, but paramedics and ambulance drivers among
others. Later I argue that undifferentiated talk of emergency services clouds
thinking about the work, responsibilities, and rights of paid firefighters, police,
and paramedical personnel. There are important differences between the risks
of firefighting and policing, and between both of these and the work of
paramedics. There are corresponding differences between the moral risks of
mismanaging these different personnel. To insist on these differences is not to
deny that the psychological and social pressures associated with emergencies
can be similar across professional boundaries. These similarities can co-exist
with moral differences, for example because the official purposes of fire and
police services are typically quite distinct.
My discussion reflects some of the peculiarities of a fire service and of the
circumstances of the UK fire service strike in 2002–3. But there will be implica-
tions for our attitudes to emergency services in general. It is very important to
the background of ordinary and official thinking about the emergency services
that there is a difference between routine and manageable incidents on the
one hand (Sorell 2002), and disasters on the other. The greater the frequency
or risk of disasters, the more an emergency service will seem necessary, even
if it is inadequate to the tasks it faces. When routine and manageable events
are the rule, on the other hand, it becomes relevant to consider whether they
are readily preventable. If they are, the non-emergency work of prevention
can start to displace the emergency work of responding to incidents, with
the result that the emergency work starts to seem less and less essential. The
routine emergency work of the UK fire service has been downgraded in this
way, and yet the service has also been given a new mandate for dealing with
natural and terrorist disasters. The collision between a vision of a compact fire
prevention service and that of a disaster-relief agency invites different kinds of
injustice to firefighters. But since the ingredients of the UK case are present
internationally, its lessons may be of general interest.
The UK fire service: perceptions and realities
If an emergency is understood as a situation in which there is a present danger
of significant harm or loss to the public, then, in the UK, the fire service is the
emergency service par excellence. It is the service called upon to deal not only
with the threat to life and property from fires, but also from floods and other
weather disturbances, earthquakes, explosions, releases of dangerous chemical
substances, as well as major road traffic and rail accidents. The police service in
the UK also attends some of these incidents, particularly road traffic accidents,
and it is the front-line service for dealing with threats of harm or actual harm
to individuals from assault. But its range is smaller than that of the fire service.