In the first week of the New Year, a little over a month before the mayoral election, the city quietly let it be known that the firefighters were about to get their contract–almost three and a half years after the last one expired. Word was leaked through the Chicago Tribune: a January 7 article by Gary Washburn quoted various sources to the effect that the money end of the deal had been negotiated and firefighters were set to get a 4 percent raise. All that remained was tying up a few loose ends–matters such as promotions and staffing.
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About a year ago Casey’s firehouse finally got a new truck. “It’s all computerized, top of the line,” he says. “Guess what? The computer that ran the truck crashed within a week, and no one had a clue about how to fix it. We took it to the city repair facility, and they said, ‘You have to keep it here. Take a spare rig.’ We had to walk through a boneyard of old jalopies to find a replacement. We wound up with a spare that was worse than the one we traded in. We had the spare for a couple of days until they found someone who could fix the computer glitch that had busted the new truck.”
Casey and other firefighters also complain that the city too often forces them to use their big fire trucks for nonemergency runs. “Fires are down, so they have us doing other things,” he says. “The public may not realize this, but when an emergency call comes to 911–even if it’s not a fire–they send out a truck or an engine. If a grandmother falls out of her bed, they send out a truck to pick her up–they call it invalid assistance. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with helping someone’s grandmother get back in bed. If my grandmother needed assistance I would want her to get it. I think we should offer such assistance, and I take those calls. But a truck? With five firemen? Don’t you think there’s a more important use for a fire truck? You’re leaving yourself vulnerable by taking a truck or an engine on a nonfire run. You’re leaving yourself exposed in case a fire breaks out in another part of your area. Our ability to keep a fire from spreading, especially on a windy day, is based on a fast response. But if you send us out of our area to help grandma get back in bed, you make the public vulnerable.”
Cosgrove, who’s written several books about fire fighting in Chicago, agrees that the city should buy the firefighters bunker pants and put more ambulances on the street and buy better equipment. The problem, he says, is money–for which he too blames City Hall. “I think the fire department’s the greatest thing in the world, but the city does what City Hall wants,” he says. “There’s just so much string, and that’s all they get. My friends in the department tell me they have to play so many games with the budget–don’t buy toilet paper, no more overtime. It’s a stupid, big paper-shuffling game.”
Kugelman says the city was slow to agree to contract negotiation meetings. “Our last contract was signed in 1997, and it was up in July 1999,” he says. “I thought negotiations might speed up after September 11. Remember, the world was in love with firefighters after they saw how we put our lives on the line. But it didn’t work here in Chicago. They continued to stall.”
But few firefighters are convinced. “Everyone in this department has long memories,” says yet another northwest-side firefighter. “You never know when one little thing you say or do might come back to bite you in the ass.” He says the retaliation is most likely to come at promotion time: “Say you want to become a lieutenant. Well, you have to take a written and an oral test. The written test’s pretty straightforward. But the oral is strictly subjective. They sit you in a room with a couple of chiefs, and they ask you questions. They give you a fixed situation–you pull up to a fire and what do you do? Then they grade you on your response. If you’ve been outspoken, if you’ve ruffled someone’s feathers in the past, they hold that against you. I’ve heard chiefs say, ‘If I ever get that asshole on an oral, watch out.’”
