Ongoing strike action by paid firefighters in New Zealand is escalating tensions between the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) and the New Zealand Professional FireFighters Union (NZPFU), with both sides citing safety risks and pay disparities in their positions.
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I'd like to know how you feel about the firefighters and their strike. Because I have gone from soft support for the firefighters in the last few weeks to quite hard support today. And what's tipped me is this kerfuffle with the board pay. I reckon this has got to be one of the most tone-deaf things I've seen in a very long time. The board has approved pay rises for themselves of up to 79%. Meanwhile, the firefighters have been fighting and now striking for 18 months just to get pay rises. While most of them apparently sit somewhere above the minimum wage but somewhere below the living wage, which is actually not a lot of money to pay people who go into burning buildings. If this board pay actually happens like it's supposed to, the board chair is going to be paid more than any standard firefighter on the base salary. One of them is out there fire fighting fires and risking their life, and the other one is running an organization. Badly. And that is important here because if there was a good track record that we could point to, a pay rise of this scale may be justified or at least, you know, able to be explained. But this is a terribly run organization. These guys have not been able to settle the pay dispute for 18 months. Fire trucks break down so regularly, it is ridiculous and quite scary. Equipment is failing. They've just paid for a bunch of fire trucks that when they arrived into the country were too small to go to rescues because all of the equipment doesn't fit in. They spend $500,000 on a chief executive and $2.37 million on two uh on seven deputy chief executives. There are calls for a review into Fenz now because the place is so badly run. Now I'm always sympathetic to the argument that you need to pay decent rates to attract decent talent to run a place, but that is not what is about to happen here. We're simply going to be increasing the pay of the people who are already running the place quite badly. It is unreal that this is happening, but in a way, this is actually a gift to the striking firefighters. Because if they haven't already got enough public support, surely us now seeing what kind of outfit these guys are dealing with will garner some sympathy for their plight.
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long-standing and justified
Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: It's tone deaf for FENZ board members to get such a big pay riseSpotted something wrong on this page? Report a correction.
