Convict, Hotshot, or Municipal Firefighters: Which Side Are You On?
You’re all getting played.
Fire Crews Manage the Pacific Palisades Fire, LA (Photo: AP via AP via FMP; CC4.0)
When the time came to save the dreadful eyesore that is the Palisades Village Mall, Rick Caruso didn’t wait. Seeing the homes of his customers and employees quickly being consumed, he did what anyone would do and hired private firefighters to protect his capital investment at a rate of $7000/day. That is what you would do, right?
What has taken me unawares – though not necessarily by surprise – was the attention this got in the media and how it has been used (or not) in relation to the larger discussion surrounding fire crews, their compensation, and what divisions exist between different types.
While the hubbub around convict crews risking life and limb for a chance at a reduced sentence, job training, better food/recreation, and around $24/day when on the job is something that must be discussed (the issue is one of constitutionality afterall), I do feel that it has been used by some parties not as an exposé of the inhumane, essentially slave-like conditions of these workers, but as a way to further entrench differences between these firefighters and their peers.
Convict crews are getting Playstation games and sleeping gear, maybe some food donations. All of it must be inspected, approved, and distributed to the population along guidelines which necessarily take into account the status as imprisoned peoples. To some, this is equivalent to serial killers getting unsupervised weekend passes to the fair apparently, an extreme over-kindness which spoils those which are deservedly paying for their crimes in the literal Hell that is a bush/wildland fire.
Meanwhile, Municipal and Hotshot/Wildland fire crews are being pitted against one another as well as their abovementioned peers, taking political shots at one another about the lack of funding and community support which they are getting relative to the immensely important work they do. They recognize the reality which many others have seen, that the resources to support them all (minimally, let alone comfortably) are no longer available to them. Naturally, they are beginning to lash out and seek answers.
To that end, we need to talk about why non-convict crews get paid so little and why those convict crews exist in the first place.
If you believe that the California Conservation Camp Program was implemented for reasons of rehabilitation, an effort to provide opportunities to youth offenders/short-time convicts, I would ask why so many of them cannot work for the very state which implemented, runs, and has profited immensely off of this program. Afterall, if California payed all ~950 of these specific firefighters the pay offered to Firefighter I positions doing seasonal work (~$4159/month), they would be costing somewhere around $4million/month in salary (honestly, a bargain compared to what imprisoning them costs in the first place). Change that to the current status quo where the these firefighters are being paid a fraction of that ($365/month + humane living conditions) and you begin to see where I am coming from. No matter how much it costs to house, feed, transport, and train these prisoners, they will always be cheaper, more easily managed, and more expendable than a non-convict crew.
Now ask yourself who is served by this setup. It clearly isn’t the municipal and wildland crews who are being primed not only against one another in a political shit-flinging match over why water hydrants can’t work in a forest or how gravity and physics work when dealing with water in such massive quantities, but who are looking to the attention the neo-liberal news is focusing on convict crews and seeing (rightly) that they are being used to diminish and distract from those fighting fires professionally and for salary.
And that is what this is at the end of the day. Crews, all doing some variant of the same job, all crucial to the overall operation regardless of professional origin or apportioned task, are being intentionally pointed at one another by media and politicians to obfuscate the reality: you are all being taken advantage of.
Returning to private crews raking in upward of $10k/day to protect private capital while public infrastructure and communities are left to burn all around them, perhaps we should ask what their purpose in all this is. Could the resources they are given have been used to save homes, landmarks, and infrastructure rather than a now-pointless mall? Afterall, who is going to be spending their free time and already scant cash at this place after such catastrophe? How many residents are going to ever return after seeing this flagrant use of resources for the benefit of a single billionaire’s passion project; a sacrifice of their own homes, schools, businesses, and third-spaces for something which didn’t truly benefit them in the first place and which now, protected by National Guard soldiers, stands tall over the ruin of their lives.
Frankly, could some of the dead have been saved had these firefighters not been so utilized. Could the State of California not have covered their outrageous (comparatively) salaries to augment the resources that leadership continues to emphasize just weren’t enough?
This is the problem, the core issue: the only way to live comfortably and have professional mobility is to sell yourself not to public service like our wonderful fire crews working for crumbs at the end of the Forestry Departments’ tables, but to the highest bidder in the time of extreme emergency. If you want anything but wage-slavery, you have to be a mercenary and that means carrying the moral and ethical weight of what that means. If you are one of these private firefighters who saved a mall rather than a neighborhood, who use their inflated pay as leverage against their peers who are left at the bottom of a de-runged ladder, I would love to hear from you. Frankly, I understand the “get your bag” shit of late-stage capitalism, but be serious and tell me how this is any different than leaving public service to work for Blackwater during Hurricane Katrina, the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, or Syria.
The point of paying municipal and wildland crews so little while expecting so much is clear, they can be replaced as necessary by cheap, malleable convict labor. They don’t have a right to strike for more pay or opportunity afterall, nor can they quit; they don’t have any legal protections and are wards of the State held “legally” in slavery. At the end of the day, they are pawns and so are you (and so are the private, for-profit crews for that matter), all being used to economically leverage you against yourselves and to manufacture some difference between y’all that doesn’t come down to strictly cash-in-hand at the end of the month. High-dollar crews show you what’s possible (it isn’t really), prisoner crews show you what you will be replaced with if you speak up about any of it. You, the one in the middle, is at risk from both ends, replaceable by either low-wage slaves/ high-dollar contractors and thereby held in check, politically isolated and paralyzed.
It is understandable and reasonable that many of you feel slighted by the overwhelming attention that convict crews are getting. As many of you have mentioned, it isn’t uncommon for news media to focus almost exclusively on these populations and it can feel like they are doing so intentionally despite the clear needs of non-convict crews – and I assure you, we hear you on the Left as much as we hear the convict crew even if you don’t have the informational streams to hear us talking back. But I implore you, please, look at this structure for what it is: worker manipulation and disempowerment.
There is no replacement for you, none. Your job is essential and demanded in every corner of the planet and has existed for as long as humans have had to deal with the temperamental nature of fire. If you think that contractors will replace you, I ask that you show me where they will come from that isn’t increased slavery by the prison-industrial complex. Afterall, if they wanted to pay you what they pay private crews, they could. So, if you are barely willing to work for the pittance, who will? Immigrants?
So listen to me now. Ask yourself do you, your family, or community benefit from this system whatsoever? Does a world where cities can burn but malls must stand sound like a system which values you, your labor, or your communities? Do you think that any of you are free of the manipulations of oligarchs in the US and their pet legislators?
You are being played. We all are.
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