Firefighter salaries in most countries are an absolute joke. It's a job that doubles your cancer risk and requires you to do shift work which is known to be damaging to your health, not to mention you're putting your life on the line anytime you step into a burning building to try and rescue someone. Plus they'll often be doing first aid if they're the first on the scene. Just pay them the fucking respectable wage they deserve. Really winds me up the way governments treat them.
It really should be a no-brainer to pay the men and women that take on the firefighting role.
I'm in the Midwest and the exodus we experienced in volunteer firefighting is extremely worrying, on top of that a recent city board meeting went side ways when a hot headed alderman couldn't keep his professionalism in check and blasted 2 recently hired firefighters because they lived outside the 25 mile zone (27, 29 respectfully), due to housing issues. Home fires have only increased since 2020, yet we twiddle our thumbs for proper pay and empowering our fire services that need it.
The police got their huge increase in budgets during 2020-2022, but I haven't heard the same for firefighters. Weird considering it's a popular service, I mean I'm not aware of a firefighter equivalent to "FTP".
> Just pay them the fucking respectable wage they deserve.
In many rural areas; it's not even a for pay job;
It's volunteer outside most major cities; in Alabama and Georgia. It's not even part of sales or property taxes here; the volunteer fire department (with no employees, much less a paid head of marketing or collections) has to market to the community.
In Arizona there are fire subscriptions offered by fire departments to property owners adjacent to but outside their jurisdiction. Voters had rejected a tax.
In one are of Tennessee they would rescue people but let structures burn if they did not subscribe. This was an unpopular policy and they now bill non-subscribers for fire service. Of course people who had their house catch on fire may not be the best financial status and any lien the FD gets will be on some ruins.
Most if not all prisoner fire crews are strictly volunteer, and only open to the lowest-tier of offenders -- low risk; certain crimes are automatic disqualifications. There are also health, fitness, and other requirements.
They get something like $26/day on the low end, and their work earns time-served credits, meaning every day spent on a crew counts for 2 extra days served.
They also get full-on vocational training, and are eligible for firefighter jobs when they get out. It is, among other things, a rehabilitation program.
I'd hardly call it slavery, and it has a number of very fair perks, esp. considering that the person is a felon. I lived in San Diego for a little and the general consensus was that the prisoners worked hard and were competent -- nothing else to do but train.
Do they get a choice of staying back at the pen or going to fight fires? if not then they're definitely slaves, plus the 13th amendment specifically bans slavery except in prison, so technically prisons legally can and do treat inmates as slaves.
This is just another causality of politics burying their head in the sand from cost of living economics for over a decade. We are looking a major reckoning coming our way and well beyond firefighters.
Basically a bulldozer-sized device that can light and extinguish fires in a controlled manner, for prescribed burns. It also filters the produced smoke.
Out here in the prairie state, we could use something like that at half the size or even smaller. A lot of native plant restoration and invasive species management involves burning, and a lot of the areas are small lots interspersed with housing developments. In fact, a lot of people dedicate portions of their yard to prairie grasses instead of regular grass. And especially on private property, people just set things on fire all by themselves in the springtime.
A relatively cheap service that brings in one of these things would probably be a lot better.
>USFS firefighter pay is dictated by the federal pay scale, where most start at the GS-3 level and where pay tops out at around $31,000 annually for full-time employees. By comparison, a first-year firefighter with Cal Fire makes nearly double that amount.
The beast just did the CARES act, essentially the largest upward transfer of wealth like that in human history. The beast is sending so much money and material to Ukraine that it accidently sent billions of dollars extra. The beast isn't starving it just doesn't give a shit about you.
No it didn’t. It technically sent $billions less to Ukraine due to the incorrect valuation being used for the mostly obsolete military equipment we’re lend leasing Ukraine.[1] It just means there’s $6.2B more worth of obsolete equipment that can be sent under existing authorization. Technically we’re ridding ourselves of the massive cost of decommissioning the equipment, getting valuable real-world intel on system performance and enemy capabilities, while knee capping one of our major geopolitical adversaries and our only significant marginal cost is shipping! This is the financial deal of the century!
> We have 6.2 billion worth of extra war crime equipment available
We don't have $6.2B worth as it's military accounting value, not actual value. There are no buyers for this obsolete equipment apart from Ukraine, and no longer any use for the US military. The money put into the equipment is a sunken cost and the US Gov has to incur the ongoing cost of storage or decommissioning. This entire controversy is based on a seemingly willful misunderstanding of why the military gives obsolete equipment a monetary label and then an equivocation of that monetary value label with actual money.
Eh, Ukraine is defending it's land from invaders that are actively genociding their population and aiming to exterminate their culture. I'm sorry but we must have war crimes confused.
Well pick whatever social program you want to implement and imagine it as cluster munitions leaving unexploded ordnance all over the place to kill and mutilate civilians, remaining dangerous long after the conflict is over, because that's what you picked instead.
> Well pick whatever social program you want to implement and imagine it as cluster munitions
All the numbers thrown around about the lend lease program are military accounting and do not impose almost any actual costs to the US tax payer, basically just the cost of shipping which is minuscule compared to the Military budget let alone Entitlements. Therefore, the comparison of essentially military funny-money and actual Entitlement increases is just hyper-partisan nonsense.
I forgot the sarcasm tag. Politicans who quack about stuff like this are generally full of shit.
Pretending to care about “the beast” means you make sure firefighters make less than McDonald’s managers, while “supporting the troops” by making sure your local defense contractors continue to get paid for making overpriced bolts or whatever.
No, it is not. The governments in all western countries throw almost unlimited money out of the window for the dumbest stuff imaginable.
Paying the guys keeping the burning parts of your country in check enough, so that they keep doing it seems like it would be up there with "maintaining roads".
The US federal budget deficit for the month of June was $228 billion. Money is being spent and the money printer is running no problem. The administration clearly does not view this as an important issue.
It's tempting to consider "the administration" or "the government" as a single entity that you can reason about like it was an individual.
More likely, there is a bit of focused lobbying being done to suborn the few decisionmakers involved with this, so that a company that contracts firefighting services to the government can grow their contract.
I don't know exactly how it works in California. I know there is a "California Conservation Camp" program that pays inmates $2.90 to $5.12 per day while in the camps, and $1.4 per hour fighting fires, but I don't know if they work with only state prisons or if private prisons get in on that too.
Maybe the cost savings there are enough to drive this dynamic.
People just want simple answers to complex problems, or in this case, purposely obtuse government workings. Not saying we don't have members in congress with good intentions, but they aren't in the positions of weighted power, often times they find themselves snuffed out or forced to fall in line.
The recent railroad strike fiasco was a perfect example of how things are really ran.
it would help if we would reallocate funds from the "kill the middle east brown people" fund to the "pay needed services" fund, like firefighting, replacement of water supply lines to homes, etc.
Every one of those top 100 is a medical officer and most I'd guess are doctors, they could all work in private sector healthcare and make a lot more money. I notice that not a SINGLE CTO or technology lead in government made the top 100 list.
The choice of the number 100 is arbitrary. I'm sure we can find some CTO or whatever you want at spot number 587 that makes 387k a year or whatever. Yes, the top 100 are medical officers, but the government has 17,000 employees that made more than 200k last year. They can't all be medical officers...
Because as you've described it, that wage won't scale with inflation. It sounds irresponsibly high now, but wait around and $100 in the future will sound like the $2.13/h + $30+/wk we have today.
>The situation has grown so dire that the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California saw 42 resignations in 48 hours in May, officials said.
this appears to be yet another "wage negotiation via public pressure" piece, similar to "truck driver shortage" ? and now, apparently "life guard shortage"
no shortage of high-end golf clubs to visit while thinking about wages, here in the USA
Shaming workers for enterprise wide service level issue is ironic. Sufficient staffing is literally the responsibility of management not individual employees. Since unions are being snuffed out in the United States labor does not have any input into hiring or compensation decisions (unlike Germany).
...You realize the life guard shortage is real and a result of decisions of collective social hivemind decisions right?
Schools have increasingly dropped swimming pools and programs in favor of football and baseball, because that's what parents want.
School swim programs used to be one of the biggest "drivers" of summer lifeguards, as kids could easily pass the lifeguard swim tests and get themselves what was a cool summer gig.
At the same time, the lifeguard gig wasn't really a high paying job, usually a dollar or two above minimum wage. This was fine decades ago, but not in 2023.
We also instituted training requirements on them because the municipality will get sued if that lifeguard's actions resulted in an injury or death and they didn't have those X hours of training.
Nowadays, that same kid not only doesn't know how to swim, but working in a Amazon Warehouse or Walmart pays more and safer for that pay.
The shortage is after decades of decisions building up to a crux.
