As a serving FF in London, this strike is the last resort and none of us, I repeat NONE of us want to strike, we have been forced to take this measure as we have been bullied and harassed into this by our boss......the infamous Brian Coleman. It's not about us wanting more money (we have taken a paycut and are having our wages frozen). It's not about us sleeping (even tho most of you would want a rested FF if you needed us in the middle of the night) It's not about us wanting to do a 2nd job (which only some of us need due to not being able to afford to live in London) It's not about wanting more time to play snooker or watch tele (we are now always training, learning new procedures, doing CFS, or premises visits, oh and we often don't even get a full hour lunch/dinner break due to this and we need to prepare all the food in that time). . It's about us being bullied by the management into changing the current shift system (which incidentally works brilliantly and we also hit all our targets on this current system). It's so they can make the 25% cuts in our service, which means job loses, station closures, loss of fire engines and reduction in overall fire cover in london. Oh and the finer detail is they have threatened all 5500 firefighters with the sack, so they can re-employ us on a new contract to facilitate these cuts. They are using clever people on lots of money to word it all, so it looks like we're being unfair, the truth is out there if you look at some of the pages on social networking sites. . So anyone out there who are saying we're 'selfish', 'sack them all', their being unprofessional' etc etc. . Do you want the fire brigade to protect you and your families and for us to be there when you really need us, or cross your fingers and hope that the station that has had one fire engine taken away, isnt on another shout and you need to wait for the closest station to get to you? 3 mins of smoke inhalation and the brain is dead.... think about it. What do you want from a service that YOU pay for???? Yes i'm biased, but if I wasn't in the service then I would want what's best for me and my family and thats for the LFB to turn up when I need them.
