The media, the Liberals and now the courts are waging a hysterical witch-hunt against the United Firefighters Union (UFU) in Victoria for daring to stand up for the basic conditions of its members. The union is being denounced for supposedly attempting to take over the running of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and undermining the effectiveness of fire fighting in Victoria.

The Age and the Herald Sun have been vitriolic in their attacks on the Andrews Labor government for agreeing to meet some of the firefighters’ claims. The press have championed the bunch of arch-reactionaries and slimy bosses who dominate the CFA board and former emergency services minister Jane Garrett for her disgraceful hard line, union bashing stance.

The Liberals and their mates in the media have also sought to mobilise CFA volunteers as shock troops against the unionised full time fighters by whipping up fears that somehow the union’s industrial claims will damage volunteers. In reality the union is simply fighting for quite modest improvements in the pay and conditions of workers who do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

As for the absurd claims that the union’s demands would undermine the authority of the notorious CFA management – if only it were true.

CFA management have an appalling record of sacrificing the health and safety of both paid firefighters and volunteers in order to run the fire service at minimum expense to big business.

This is most graphically illustrated in the case of the CFA’s training school at Fiskville, where for decades trainees were contaminated with cancer-inducing chemicals. CFA management knew perfectly well that Fiskville was unsafe but refused to shut it down and, year after year, sent people there for training.

The CFA management deliberately withheld test documents that confirmed that contaminated water at Fiskville was leading to clusters of cancer and publicly insisted that everything was fine. The other government bodies that are supposed to protect the health of workers – WorkSafe and the Environmental Protection Authority – colluded with the CFA management in the cover-up. This is precisely why workers need strong, fighting unions to protect their health and safety.

It’s not just the paid firefighters who benefit from the union’s campaign for improved safety conditions and limitations on the right of management to risk lives, but also the broader public and the volunteer firefighters who are used as guinea pigs by management.

It is an outrageous situation that 60 percent of suburban Melbourne and major regional centres such as Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat are still controlled by the CFA rather than the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. Why should suburbs such as Springvale, Frankston, Dandenong, Rowville, Epping, Point Cook and Werribee have to rely on volunteers rather than full time paid fighters?

It is simply a means to do fire fighting on the cheap and weaken the industrial power of the Firefighters Union.

In NSW, by comparison, the equivalent of the CFA, the NSW Rural Fire Service, operates only in genuinely rural areas. Fire and Rescue NSW, the equivalent of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, services 90 percent of the population of NSW, including many country towns, and relies on a relatively small number of volunteers.

Fire fighting is a vital public service. We should no more have to rely on volunteers to do it in suburban Melbourne or major regional cities than we should rely on volunteers to staff hospitals, schools and universities or to drive ambulances.

In bushfire-prone areas, clearly there is a need for a much greater number of part time firefighters who can be mobilised over summer, but they also should be paid for their work. Large numbers of part timers are paid by the government to work in the Army Reserve, for the Australian Electoral Commission and to collect the census, so why should you have to risk your life fighting fires for no pay?

The reliance on large numbers of volunteers not only undermines the conditions of full time fighters but puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers, especially in rural areas. It also undermines the idea that governments should have to provide basic public services for all.

The media, the employers and the Liberals champion the idea of volunteers doing this work because it reduces the need to tax big companies and the rich. But as well they see the volunteers as a force to be cultivated to be used against the unions and as a voting base for the conservative parties.

On 10 June, Jane Garrett, who had stridently backed the CFA board’s campaign against the union, was quite rightly forced to resign from state cabinet. It is a reflection on the bankrupt state of the Labor left that Garrett, who cynically used feminist rhetoric to justify her pro-boss stance, was and presumably still is a member of the ALP Socialist Left faction.

With the anti-union Garrett out of the way, the Andrews government instructed the CFA board to sign off on the agreement or be sacked. The board, acting via the scab outfit Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria, then obtained a Supreme Court injunction from the known anti-union judge Michael McDonald, who previously acted for Grocon in its attacks on the construction union. The government moved against the board nonetheless. A new board will be appointed shortly, but the campaign against the union continues. 

All of this makes it absolutely vital that every other union and the left mobilise in solidarity with the UFU in a determined stance against these relentless ruling class attacks. What is at stake in this dispute has now gone well beyond the specific claims of the firefighters. It is a concerted attack by all the forces of the big end of town on the rights of all workers and aims to force the Andrews government to retreat from delivering even the most modest reforms for its working class supporters.