Frank’s still got the fire in his belly
Firefighter Frank Howell is part of the army of volunteers who make up the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s We Are Union campaign for the state election, to be held on 29 November. Howell, a 31-year veteran of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and union stalwart is active in his local electorate of Bentleigh in the southern suburbs of Melbourne, which is the Coalition government’s fourth most marginal seat requiring a swing of just 0.9% to return to Labor.
“I joined the fire brigade in 1983. I was a baggy arsed firefighter for six years and then was promoted to a station officer in 1989 and that’s been my rank since.
“I can be in charge of a one appliance station or even some two appliance stations. Off and on I’ve been here in Malvern as a station officer around 20 years. I’ve worked all over southern district and central.
“The most rewarding aspect of the job for me is the ability to help the community when there’s a crisis in someone’s life. Unfortunately we get called to too many of those but by the same token we’re trained to deal with that. But it’s a special thing to have the public’s confidence in our skills when they’re in a crisis.
“One of the biggest skills I think firefighters do possess is problem solving because each call is different and has its own set of problems attached to it. Even if it’s a false alarm or investigating alarms or it can range up to a life critical entanglement of someone, whether it be an industrial accident, road rescues, trench collapse. It could be a dog caught up a fence. You’ve got to problem solve to mitigate the emergency.
“Some of the things that stick out in my mind are the raw trauma and emotions you experience on the scene dealing with family who are involved in an incident.
“I’m well and truly aware of the baggage that accrues over your career, especially with what we call emergency medical response now. We go out to anything from a cot death to a 99-year-old that’s expired and anything in between.”
Came to the job late
“I was 25 when I became a firefighter. A long, long time ago.
“I left school at 15 and trained as a printer for four years. Did an apprenticeship. And unbeknownst to me, the type of printing I was doing at that time was becoming redundant.
“It is common [for people to join the fire brigade as a career change]. We’ve got quite a mixed bag of firefighters and their experiences in life. We’ve got people who are engineers, we’ve got a physicist, we’ve got people who have been trained medically such as nurses, a lot of school teachers. As well as a plenty of trades people.
“There are four shifts a day. We work a 10/14 roster, same as the ambos. You don’t have good quality sleep at work and there’s a lot of firefighters who suffer sleep deprivation because of their rostering and also the anticipation of calls. But that 10/14 is believed to be the best way of dealing with shift work.
“When I got divorced around about 20-odd years ago, at that time within the fire service, the MFB, divorce rates were running about 60%. My own thoughts are with our rostering, over that eight-week cycle you only get two weekends that aren’t impacted by shift work.
“It places a lot of stress on relationships, and family relationships, a lot of time the partner seems to have a sense of feeling trapped. We can always go to work and release the stress of the family but they’re left holding the bag 24/7. I really think that has a lot to do with it.
“I’ve got two boys, they’re both adults now. The 26-year-old’s just completed a plumbing apprenticeship, he came into that late. And my 24-year-old is part of a rifle company in the ADF stationed up in Brisbane.”
The value of unions
“When I became a firefighter, it was compulsory to join the union. It was a closed shop. But I was a member of the TWU before that and the PKIU prior to that.
“I’ve been a delegate for around about 10 years.
“The thing that motivated me to become active and a delegate in the union was bullying in the workplace that I encountered, of myself and others . . . I resolved then that I would stand up for others in the workplace and wouldn’t allow them to be bullied like the way they tried to bully me and others.
“Management can be very bloodyminded at times. I really think that most of the OHS issues can be discussed and worked out without having to resort to disputes and elevated to dispute level. But every time we have a conservative government in the board tends to go on a crusade.
“I don’t believe that the union does run the job but I do believe a vacuum has been created over the years because of poor management at the highest level of the fire service and through necessity the union has had to step in and be the persons that implement and activate policies to the betterment of not just the firefighters but community safety.”
“The MFB have tried to terminate our current agreement. They maintain the union is obstructionist in the introduction of new work practices, new equipment, those sort of things. We feel quite strongly that we’re not obstructionist.
“Because of the type of work that we do, we believe we should have a say in the implementation of new work practices, new equipment, those types of things because they’re critical to our role and it’s our health and safety that’s on the line.
“They want to get rid of the consultation clause which says that before implementation consultation must occur. They want to have 100% say on implementation. They just want to be able to introduce anything they see fit, whether that be new procedures, new equipment, new training, anything.
“That case has been heard and the decision’s pending.
“The value of unions that I see is not just necessarily confined to a workplace. I’ve done a lot of work through Trades Hall with different unions over the years.
“I’ve been involved with the Free East Timor campaign, for instance. That had very little to do with workplace rights, but we could see that they needed our assistance and it was a human rights issue and human rights becomes worker’s rights as far as we’re concerned.
“There are roles for unions in pressuring governments over their policies and one of those that I have an issue with both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party is refugee policy. They both just seem to pander to the rednecks.”
Rallying the troops
“I live in Bentleigh, [and] I helped clean out [ex-MP] Rob Hudson’s electorate office when he got defeated in 2010 and we were talking about it and the unfortunate thing was 260 votes won government for the Liberals at the last election. Had 131 voted the other way, we would’ve had a Labor government, but they didn’t and Rob Hudson who was a well-respected member for Bentleigh got defeated.
“Around about two years ago, in conversation with [United Firefighters Union Secretary] Peter Marshall, we decided that with the advent of the new enterprise bargaining agreement we knew that we were going to have a fight on our hands with the government so we started to develop a strategy for how we would go about our new EBA and pressurise the government and we decided our best course of action would probably be a political campaign.
“I didn’t talk to Peter about it much at all after that, but I know how to organise so I got on the phone and started to develop list of people.
“I made a lot of phone calls to the troops in the field, the firefighters. And I started to get this strong feeling that the troops in the field were in for a fight and were prepared to stand up and fight.
“When I started doing these phone calls, I was hopeful of getting half a dozen [volunteers] out of 1400 to help, but everyone kept saying ‘yeah, okay that sounds like a good idea’. I spoke to Peter Marshall about it and said do you realise how much groundswell of support there is there, and he was blown away by it.
“And really it’s become a juggernaut, everyone’s got on board with it. And to be honest the employers and government have played their part beautifully because they have antagonised the firefighters, they have been the sole creators of a lot of activists. They’ve created another generation of people who distrust management.
“I think there was always that intention of Trades Hall to get on board with it. We could see what was happening with the nurses dispute, the teachers as well and the paramedics were in the thick of it at the time.
“We started to develop a plan and then I got exposed to [Victorian Trades Hall Secretary] Luke Hilakari.”
‘People trust us’
“I’m now volunteering about two days a week, contacting people on this side of town. There’s a great level of enthusiasm. It’s been going for a while now, we did our first doorknocking in February so this campaign has been a long egg hatching.
“When we go doorknocking, we have nurses, teachers, paramedics and firefighters and we try to pair up a firefighter or other public sector worker with an orange person — we call them that because they wear an orange t-shirt.
“When a firefighter or a nurse or an ambo turns up on a doorstep, it’s been invaluable to our campaign. They’re all such trusted professions, but the community doesn’t rub shoulders very often with firefighters or ambos. They see us going past in a big red truck but always at a distance, but having a firefighter roll up and have a conversation makes a real difference, because we’re a real person, we’re not a politician.
“We get a terrific response in the marginal seats, people thanking us and even conservatives who say they will vote Liberal very rarely do not sign our petitions.
“We’re in the last few weeks now and I feel we’re making inroads but as I caution others, this is not a time to relax, we’ve got to push all the way to the line and hopefully on election night we will get a good outcome.
“I’m hoping we can roll out a similar campaign in the future. Like the old Leonard Cohen song says, “first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”.
“We want to get rid of the government in Canberra because if they get in again, make no mistake, WorkChoices will be back again.”
Published on 24 October 2014.
