What’s a firefighter worth? What am I worth as one? I can’t speak for everyone who does this job, and I’ve never really looked at where I fit on that scale. Both questions came out of a video I watched recently about economics, inherited wealth, and what a society decides its people are worth. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped thinking about economics and started thinking about the fire service. The comparison is imperfect, but that might be why it’s useful. What happens if you look at a fire department the way an economist looks at a society? What gets inherited? Where’s the capital? Who controls it? Who provides the labor? Perhaps most interestingly, where has the system established its minimum? These are questions I’m still working through myself.
Start with inheritance. Economists argue endlessly about how much wealth is earned and how much is passed from one generation to the next. Some widely cited estimates put the inherited share as high as 60%. The fire service has its own version of inherited wealth. We inherit stations, apparatus, policies, staffing models, promotional systems, traditions, union agreements, budgets, and organizational charts. Being handed a department with a great culture is a lot like being born into money, and the real work becomes maintaining it. Other departments inherit years of mismanagement, shorted funding, or economic shifts that let them fall through the cracks. If inheritance really accounts for that much wealth, I have to wonder whether a department in that position can ever become wealthy. The same numbers leave room for it: even at 60%, $4 in every $10 has been earned by the people who own them.
We also inherit assumptions. Some are incredibly valuable. Others made sense 20 or 30 years ago and have simply survived long enough to become accepted as fact. A new generation walks into a system largely built by people who are no longer there and is immediately taught how that system works.
Inherited Wealth, Inherited Thinking
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Inheritance can be an advantage. You don’t want every generation rebuilding the fire service from scratch. But inherited value and inherited thinking are two different things. The problem begins when preserving what we inherited becomes more important than asking whether it still serves the people using it.
Now consider the corporation. In this analogy, the corporation is the institution itself: the department, the municipality, the infrastructure, the budget, the policies and everything required to make the organization function. Chiefs and administrators become the people responsible for allocating resources and deciding where investment goes. Municipal councils establish another layer of governance. The public funds the enterprise and expects a return in the form of protection, competence and availability. Firefighters provide the labor that turns all of that capital into an actual service.
Economists track how closely the return to labor follows what that labor produces. For 30 years after it was created, the U.S. federal minimum wage rose largely in step with productivity. The two lines separated after it peaked in 1968. If the minimum wage had kept pace, estimates from the past few years suggest it would be somewhere between $21 and $26 an hour. It has been $7.25 since 2009, the longest freeze since the law took effect in 1938. Canada’s floor is set province by province, and Statistics Canada found that the average real minimum wage in 2013 was almost identical to where it stood in 1975. That is nearly four decades of economic growth with no real gain at the bottom, and provincial increases since then have recovered some of that ground.
When the Work Outgrows the Workforce
Our version of that gap shows up in call volume. Since 1980, the number of calls U.S. fire departments run each year has more than tripled, while the number of career firefighters has grown by about 50%. The work changed shape along the way: fire calls fell by more than half, and medical calls multiplied fivefold. From the outside, plenty of departments look much as they did a generation ago, yet calls per firefighter have tripled. Canadian departments answer more than 2 million calls a year, according to the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, with about half of them supporting the health care system and only around one in 10 involving fire suppression. Roughly 15,000 firefighter positions sit vacant, and the country loses about 9,000 firefighters every year, each with an average of 11 years of experience. Somebody absorbs that difference, and morale usually registers it long before a budget does.
That brings me back to minimum wage, although this time I don’t mean wages. In economics, a minimum wage establishes a floor. Below this number, society has decided labor cannot legally be valued. What’s the fire service equivalent? Maybe it’s the minimum level of investment we consider acceptable for the firefighter providing the service.
What’s the minimum acceptable station? The minimum staffing level? The minimum access to fitness equipment, cancer-prevention measures, behavioral health resources, sleep conditions, nutrition, training, functioning gear and facilities that don’t feel institutional? What’s the minimum amount of attention given to morale, relationships, retention and the health of the person expected to perform when everyone else is having the worst day of their life?
Defining the Minimum We Owe Our People
Every department has answers to those questions, whether it has written them down or not. You can see them in the budget.
Money is finite. Increasing investment somewhere means making a decision about somewhere else. Apparatus, training, equipment, technology, compensation, firefighter health and community programs all matter. There’s no magical account where unlimited money waits for every worthwhile idea. As I see it, the job of leadership is deciding how those competing demands fit together and being able to explain why.
But efficiency has a dangerous side when the calculation only measures what an organization spends and ignores what it consumes. A department can save money by running vacancies, leaning heavily on overtime, postponing station improvements, asking more from fewer people or accepting working conditions everyone has become accustomed to. On paper, that can look efficient. Economically, however, that cost has been transferred, and it shows up as fatigue, injuries, disengagement, family strain, sick time, turnover, resentment or experienced firefighters deciding they’ve had enough.
The Cost of Efficiency
Businesses understand that equipment requires maintenance because neglected equipment eventually fails. We seem much more willing to debate whether investment in the human being operating it is an expense we can postpone.
The truth is, there’s another economic idea worth borrowing: wealth is only as valuable as what you do with it. The fire service has inherited enormous wealth in experience, traditions, public trust, infrastructure and generations of lessons purchased at considerable cost. Our generation is responsible for protecting that inheritance. We also have to decide what deserves to be preserved and what needs to be improved, because the minimum we accept for our people today becomes part of what the next generation inherits.
