212 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
when no particular duties are carried out at all, but where fire service staffhave
to be ready to respond quickly to an emergency (see Bain 2002: Figure 3.14).
Facts about the shift pattern in the fire service also put the question of
salary in an unexpected light. The pattern of about 95 per cent of full-time
firefighters in the UK is two day shifts followed by two night shifts followed
by four days off. This pattern permits staffto take second jobs, and many
(Bain does not say exactly how many) do. So it becomes a question what
is meant by a full-time job in the fire service, and also how many hours of
stand-down time, which at night can be hours of sleep, are paid for at the
same rate as hours of duties. There are further questions about the timings of
shifts, and especially about the effectiveness of having shift changes at times of
heavy demand for the fire service (Bain 2002: §§3.30–3.38). The shift pattern
in the fire service does not seem to have even a rough counterpart in the police
service, and independent studies commissioned by Bain found police service
duties at different ranks more onerous than those in the fire service (Bain
2002: §§8.12–8.13). Attempts since the end of the strike to introduce some
paperwork duties during stand-down time have been strenuously resisted, to
such an extent that there was a recurrence of industrial action as late as May
2004 in some places in England, including Salford in Greater Manchester.
It might be thought that what makes the job of firefighter unusually
demanding is notactually being called uponto risk one’s life, but having to be
prepared to do so whenever one is on duty. If this is right, then the FBU poster
may not be so misleading after all. But compare firefighting to military service
in peacetime. In that case, too, there is a preparedness to go into action that is
potentially lethal, but the chances of doing so are far less than during military
service in war. Active service in war comes much closer to the threshold of
routine life-risking than either military service in peacetime or normal fire-
service work. An intermediate case might be ordinary fire fighting duty during
a drought in a highly forested area, or ordinary firefighting duty in an area
where even false alarms usually expose fire crews to attacks from hostile inner
city youths. Outside these cases the moral weight attaching to being prepared
to risk one’s life is probably slight, because the chances of actually being called
upon to risk one’s life are slight.
Even when firefighting is indisputably life threatening, there is something
wrong with the FBU’s implication that not many members of the public would
attempt it for £6 per hour, and something wrong also with the popular idea
that one needs to have heroic impulses to go into firefighting. First, as Bain
makes clear, there are forty applicants for every fire service vacancy in the UK
(Bain 2002: §3.39). Second, there is a difference between, on the one hand,
someone properly trained and equipped to take life-threatening risks, and,
on the other, someone who makes, as we might say, a superhuman effort
against great odds. It might take heroism for an ordinary agent to attempt
what a trained firefighter is used to doing when fighting fires. It would only