Quantum Windbag
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- May 9, 2010
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Ever wonder what happens when fire departments refuse to put out fires? It is a long article, but well worth the read.
The Firemen Next Time - John Berlau - National Review Online
I wonder if the people who condemned the firefighters in Tennessee will speak up against these examples. After all, everyone has a right to strike, even if it means a house, or five, burns down, or someone ends up dead.
In his week-long coverage of the event, Olbermann also touted the condemnation of the fire department by the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), the largest fire-fighters union. IAFF president Harold Schaitberger proclaimed in a press release that everyone deserves fire protection because providing public safety is among a municipalitys highest priorities. The press release concluded that because of a pay-to-play policy, fire fighters were ordered to stand and watch a family lose its home. But what Schaitberger and his allies didnt say is that fire fighters in municipal fire departments have several times been ordered to stand by and watch families lose their homes, and sometimes lose their lives. And who gave those orders? None other than the IAFF and other unions enforcing the pay-to-play policy known as the strike.
If the liberal blog site Think Progress wishes to frame fire protection as an issue of two competing visions of government and include the response to the Cranick fire as the conservative vision . . . on full display (which it isnt necessarily, as I will explain), then the liberal vision of an urbanized and unionized professional fire department has to be scored as resulting in more property damage, injuries, and deaths. And if the IAFF and its allies get their way with federal legislation to mandate collective bargaining for public-safety officers in every American community, the deadly fire-fighter strikes of the recent past will almost certainly be a part of our progressive future.
Consider what happened in Memphis 32 years ago. On July 1, 1978, 1,400 union fire fighters walked off the job after rejecting the citys offer of a 6 percent pay increase, leaving only 150 non-union personnel to assist supervisors. Over the weekend of July 2 and 3, fires broke out around the city in far greater than normal numbers, recounted professors Armand Thieblot and Thomas Haggard in their comprehensive book Union Violence: The Record and the Response, published by the Industrial Research Unit of the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School. On Saturday, the first day of the strike, 225 alarms of fire were reported, and on the following day, there were about 125. Memphis mayor Wyeth Chandler told a local newspaper that the group of fires was one of the most unreal scenes Ive ever seen. It was like a World War II newsreel.
The Firemen Next Time - John Berlau - National Review Online
I wonder if the people who condemned the firefighters in Tennessee will speak up against these examples. After all, everyone has a right to strike, even if it means a house, or five, burns down, or someone ends up dead.