FBU Follow

FIRE BRIGADES Union (FBU) members across Britain and Northern Ireland are debating how to take forward their campaign against huge attacks on their conditions.

ANGER SPREAD through rank and file Fire Brigades Union (FBU) activists at the end of last week as they heard that a recently elected national officer, Paul Woolstenholmes, has been suspended from his post by the union’s leadership.

THE firefighters' FBU union struck a major blow against Tony Blair last week. It came just days after Labour suffered its worst election result since 1918. That was also the year the FBU affiliated to the Labour Party. The FBU ended that affiliation last week by 35,105 to 14,611 on a card vote.

FIREFIGHTERS AND control staff have picked themselves up from a year of knockbacks by voting for a fresh strike ballot over huge attacks on their conditions. Delegates to the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) conference in Southport last week voted by 27,349 to 24,353 against effectively caving in to the employers' demands.

IMMENSE AND dogged pressure by firefighters has forced their union leaders to stop a headlong retreat in the face of employers' demands to slash conditions. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) executive last week voted unanimously to reject the employers' wording on new arrangements for night shifts and bank holidays.

THE GOVERNMENT and the fire authority employers have seized on the firefighters FBU union leadership's latest climbdown over night working to demand more concessions. "This was entirely predictable," says Tam McFarlane, secretary of the FBU South West Region. "Every time we have made concessions the employers have come back for more. That's why members in my area were saying we should not compromise over the stand down time, but should resist. That's what delegates voted for when they agreed to suspend our conference last month. There really is no alternative now to drawing a line in the sand and saying we are going to fight back."

FIREFIGHTERS IN many brigades are responding to the call for resistance at last week's Fire Brigades Union (FBU) conference by withdrawing cooperation with management and even taking unofficial action. \"Every whole-time station in the brigade has gone onto 999 calls only action,\" says Neil Day, secretary of the FBU union in Norfolk.

Jim Rogers was an activist in the FBU firefighters' union and a Labour council leader in Harlow, Essex. Now he is heading up the Respect coalition's list of candidates in the Eastern constituency for the European elections

THE BIGGEST industrial dispute under Blair has burst into flames again just as he is hammered by events in Iraq. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) conference this week voted to withdraw immediately from implementing the \"modernisation\" package that forms the settlement for last year's pay fight. The union is now reinstating a ban on overtime, abandoned as part of that deal.

FIREFIGHTERS in Tower Hamlets, east London, have voted 122 to 21 on a 55 percent turnout for action to stop them being used as a replacement ambulance service. They voted to boycott training on the use of defibrillator machines, which management want to impose not to help the public, but to get firefighters doing paramedics' jobs. Local GP and Respect supporter Kambiz Boomla explained to an 80-strong FBU meeting last week how international studies have shown no benefit for heart attack victims from such \"co-responder\" schemes.

FIRE BRIGADES Union (FBU) members in Tower Hamlets, east London, are balloting for industrial action over a scheme designed to cover up for cuts in the ambulance service by getting firefighters effectively to do two jobs. Karl Haider, a local FBU union official, told Socialist Worker what's at stake:

A CONSULTATIVE ballot of Fire Brigades Union (FBU) members was believed to have delivered a vote backing the leadership's negotiating position as Socialist Worker went to press. But it also seemed that the turnout in the poll was very low-particularly by the standards of FBU ballots.