So the Herald Sun has opened a new chapter in its war on firefighters, and virtually every other media outlet uncritically parroted their lies and misrepresentation.
There are three main lies being spread in the media: that as a result of the MFB EBA currently being voted upon by employees, fireys have too much time off (196 days every year!); that fireys are overpaid (19% pay hike!); and that the EBA gives the United Firefighters Union veto powers to overrule the decisions of the Chief Officer.
These are all lies. I’ll go through them in turn and give you the truth.
A fair year’s work
The bottom line concerning time off is how many hours are expended in exchange for your yearly income. I’ve done the sums and here’s what I found:
The numbers couldn’t be clearer. Fireys work about the same number of hours per year as someone working a standard 38-hour week with 4-weeks’ annual leave (as mandated by the National Employment Standards). In fact, they work slightly more.
(Don’t trust me? Scroll to the bottom of this article. Under the heading Calculations you’ll see my workings-out.)
It’s true that firefighters have more annual leave: 8 weeks most years. That’s because they work an extra four hours every week, and don’t get public holidays off. There are other jobs where similar compensations apply. Many workers who are required to work public holidays are compensated with 6 weeks of annual leave. Others who work 40-hour weeks are compensated with RDOs. The numbers can’t lie: firefighters work at least as many hours each year despite having more annual leave.
Incidentally, the 8-day roster cycle is oblivious to weekends and public holidays. They are ordinary work days (or work nights) for firefighters, and no penalty rates apply.
If firefighters work just as much as other workers, how did the media establish a claim that fireys have too much time off? Mostly it was through this nonsense claim that firefighters can have 196 days off every year at full pay. Suspecting this was achieved by the absurd method of adding together all the allocations for additional leave types, I decided to try the same trick using the ABC EBA, sharing my findings with an ABC reporter who parroted the 196-days-off claim: (click through to see an itemised list):
People in glass houses, etc.
I went on to look at a number of other EBAs, including the News Corp EBA, which covers Herald Sun reporters:
My point was, this method is absurd and unfair. As I note in the graphic above, by law, all workers have access to a range of additional leave types on a needs basis. No worker will use all of them, every year, or any of them, if they don’t need to.
But it gets worse. It turns out that Matt Johnston of the Herald Sun misinterpreted the EBA and tripled the allocations for personal leave and sick leave. To compound matters, he added them together, even though sick leave is taken out of a worker’s personal leave balance. The actual yearly allocation is 18 days of personal leave, of which 15 days may be used when a worker is sick. Johnston instead counted 18 × 3 = 54 days of personal leave plus 15 × 3 = 45 days of sick leave. By incompetence or subterfuge, 18 days became 99.
On top of that Johnston counted public holidays, which firefighters don’t get. There are 13 Victorian public holidays.
Johnston confirmed all of this in writing:
So this figure of 196 days off was concocted with a double-whammy of deception. Not only did it absurdly assume that a firey would use, year after year, a number of rarely-used special-purpose leave provisions. It also included 94 days — almost half the final figure — of completely spurious calculation error.
That didn’t stop dozens of media figures from propagating this claim, clearly making no effort at all to verify it.
As a result, here we are today, facing a torrent of misinformed commentary about lazy fireys and all their days off.
A fair wage
The Herald Sun article made reference to a “19% hike” in wages, and implied that MFB firefighters are overpaid. Dozens of other media outlets repeated these claims. Both claims are lies. Here are the actual wages of an MFB Qualified Firefighter — the highest classification achievable without additional leadership responsibilities and training — compared to ABS data on the Australian average full-time adult ordinary-time earnings:
Notice, the EBA — yet to come into force — includes wage rises beginning in 2015. This is because MFB already agreed to these wage rises, in November 2016.
The pay rises came after several years of total wage freeze, after the expiry of the 2010 EBA and MFB’s failure to reach agreement with the UFU on a new EBA. This is apparent by the long flat line at the left of the graph, overshadowed by an ever-growing Australian average wage. A pair of 5% pay rises brought firefighters back to parity with the average wage. A series of smaller rises serve to keep firefighters on par with the Australian average wage as it itself grows.
There is no sudden 19% hike. A total of 19% is spread out in smaller rises over period of almost six years, for an average growth rate of around 3% per year. This is higher than the current record-low Australian wage growth rate of 2.1%, but lower than the 3.5% economy-wide wage growth that is necessary to keep inflation within the desired range, according to Reserve Bank Governor Phillip Lowe.
An average wage. Does that make firefighters overpaid?
“Veto”
Firefighting is an inherently dangerous undertaking, as are all the other emergency operations performed by firefighters. After all, that’s why people call 000. Firefighters are required by law to obey the orders of the Chief Officer and any other officer. Refusal to follow an order attracts charges under the MFB Act (or CFA Act). For these reasons, it is imperative that all practical steps are taken to provide the safest equipment and procedures. Firefighters facing perilous situations to protect life and property need the confidence of knowing they won’t be let down by dodgy gear or poor planning.
That’s why, like its predecessor, the new MFB EBA contains consultation provisions. Consultation does not apply to decisions made in managing an active emergency. The powers of the Chief Officer on that front are absolute and unhampered by consultation requirements. Instead, the purpose of consultation is to engage the expert knowledge of frontline firefighters and officers when making decisions about items of equipment, protective clothing, standard operating procedures and so-on. As in all workplaces, the workers on the ground have expert knowledge at a fine level of detail that senior leaders need to take on board, for safety’s sake.
For the most part, consultation flows smoothly and achieves good outcomes. But from time to time, it goes wrong. For example, many firefighters suffered avoidable exposure to hazardous substances at the CFA training ground at Fiskville after senior managers ignored the concerns of the United Firefighters Union. Here is what a subsequent Parliamentary Inquiry found:
Under the new MFB EBA (and the old one) if consultation fails to end in agreement, that can result in the referral of a dispute to an independent umpire (ultimately the Fair Work Commission). This does not constitute a right of veto for the union. A right of veto would mean that if the union says no, the answer is no. That’s simply not the case.
So why does the media keep reporting that ‘senior sources’ (often anonymous) are furious about so-called ‘veto’ clauses?
That’s a long story that I covered in depth in a previous article.
The short version is that a certain group of (mostly former) senior managers and politicians are ideologically opposed to genuine consultation with the workforce, and especially, their union. Their objections to genuine consultation were rejected on safety grounds by the Fair Work Commission in 2014, putting a stop to the MFB’s bid to terminate the existing EBA. The 2015 Fire Services Review slammed the MFB for that move, suggesting it was part of an ‘industrial war’ waged in the service of a ‘deliberately ideological attack on the United Firefighters Union’.
None of this broke through in the media, and the discredited notion of ‘veto’ continues to be pushed in the name of industrial war upon firefighters.
It must stop. Firefighters need the safest practicable workplace so they can keep the community as safe as possible, too. There is no place for ideology when lives are on the line.
Calculations
Here’s how I calculated the yearly working hours for firefighters and for an example worker following a standard 38-hour week with 4-weeks’ annual leave (as mandated by the National Employment Standards).
Throughout, I am working with numbers — often odd decimals — that get at the long-run average. Actual figures vary year-to-year due to leap years and the fact that each year begins on different day of the week and a different point in the firefighter roster cycle. For ease of reading, I have rounded numbers off here, but when actually performing the calculations I used a spreadsheet to avoid rounding errors.
Let’s start with MFB firefighters. Incidentally, the new EBA doesn’t change the rostering system or annual leave arrangements, which have applied for many years. CFA professional firefighters follow the same system.
Firefighters work in 8-day cycles of 48 hours each. There are 365.25 days in an average year (accounting for leap years). 365.25 ÷ 8 = 45.7 eight-day cycles in a year. Fireys are allocated 65.05 days of annual leave. 65.05 ÷ 8 = 8.14 eight-day cycles of annual leave on average. This means they work 45.7 –8.14 = 37.5 eight-day cycles in an average year. In each eight-day cycle they work 48 hours, for an average yearly total of 37.5 × 48 hours = 1801 hours.
For our hypothetical worker on a standard 38-hour week with 4 weeks’ sick leave, I am assuming they take annual leave over Christmas, and so receive no benefit from Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years’ Day public holidays. Being Monday-Friday workers, they don’t gain anything out of Easter Saturday and Sunday public holidays, either. That leaves eight public holidays to count: Australia Day, Labour Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, ANZAC Day, Queen’s Birthday, Friday Before AFL Grand Final Day, and Melbourne Cup Day.
There are 365.25 ÷ 7=52.2 weeks in an average year. With five weekdays each week, there are 52.2 × 5 = 260.9 weekdays in an average year. Excluding public holidays there are 260.9 - 8 = 252.9 possible workdays. Four weeks of leave at five workdays per week means there are 4 × 5 = 20 days of annual leave to deduct, leaving 252.9 – 20=232.9 days worked. An average workday is 38 ÷ 5 = 7.6 hours — that might be achieved by actually working that amount every day, or by working 8-hour days compensated with RDOs, or by flexi-time arrangements. So over the course of an average year, this worker is at work for 232.9 × 7.6 = 1770 hours.
Note added 10/3/18: A reader pointed out that many (all?) workers achieve annual leave credit when a public holiday falls during the annual leave period. In that case, our example worker would enjoy an additional 7.6 × 3 = 22.8 hours of annual leave, reducing the total yearly hours worked to 1747.
