Firefighters, cops and class
Ground zero scuffle reveals fault line
By Greg Butterfield
New York
"Firefighters clash with police at ground zero." The news
was broadcast around the world Nov. 2, complete with videotaped
footage of cops and firefighters slugging it out.
The images startled many workers in New York, who had seen
those two groups held up together as objects of hero worship by
the corporate media and government since Sept. 11.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 off-duty firefighters rallied in
lower Manhattan on Nov. 2. They protested Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's plan to reduce the number of firefighters assigned
to round-the-clock recovery efforts at the World Trade Center
site from 50 to 24.
Firefighters broke through a police line and marched to the
site, where they were joined by building-trades workers. When
the marchers tried to enter the disaster site to say a prayer,
12 were arrested.
They were charged with felonies like "inciting to riot."
Those charges were later reduced to misdemeanors and the
firefighters were released.
Then, on the weekend of Nov. 3-4, the presidents of two
firefighter union locals-Peter Gorman of the Uniformed Fire
Officers Association and Kevin Gallagher of the Uniformed
Firefighters Association-were also arrested and charged with
criminal trespass.
Giuliani scales back recovery
The number of Fire Department personnel assigned to identify
and recover human remains has fallen from a high of 180 in late
September. On Nov. 8, in the aftermath of the firefighter-cop
battle, Giuliani reversed the previous week's cuts, raising the
number of firefighters at the site back to 50.
Some 343 fire department personnel were killed on Sept. 11.
The many casualties reflected their extreme courage in climbing
up into the burning buildings before the towers collapsed.
Fewer than 90 firefighters' bodies have been recovered.
By contrast, 23 members of the New York Police Department
died in the attack, most of them while directing traffic at the
base of the buildings. (Officer Down Memorial Page,
www.odmp.org)
City officials, including Fire Commissioner Tommy Von Essen,
claimed the recovery effort was being scaled back for safety
concerns. Yet the city had shown little concern for safety
before. At first firefighters working at the site were given
only dust masks; many still complain of a lack of safety
equipment.
It took until late October for firefighters to receive
respirators to protect them from airborne contaminants, after
repeated warnings by environmental health groups, Newsday
reported Nov. 3. "Some of the nearly 11,000 firefighters who
have been at 'ground zero' began undergoing medical screenings
at FDNY headquarters last week. The tests include lung function
exams, chest X-rays, hearing tests and blood work."
The FDNY's chief medical officer said nearly 4,000
firefighters suffer from chronic cough and lung problems,
dubbed the World Trade Center Syndrome.
'They got their gold'
Firefighter unions said the cutbacks were the result of
pressure from businesses and real-estate developers--the
business class wants to speed up the rubble removal at the
expense of identifying people's remains--and because Giuliani
wants to reduce overtime pay.
"Basically this is just going to be machines turning up
rubble and taking it out to the landfill," firefighter Danny
Schug told the Chief, the weekly civil-service employees'
newspaper. "When it's in their financial interests, they say
this is unsafe. The rest of the time they take advantage of us,
knowing that we'll do anything, no matter how ill-equipped we
are.
"The mayor loves us when we're dead," Schug said, "but as
for those of us left behind, he couldn't care less."
A popular chant at the demonstration was, "They got their
gold." Earlier that week firefighters had been assigned to help
recover tons of gold bricks, worth hundreds of millions of
dollars, buried in a bank vault under the rubble. Many felt it
was no coincidence that cutbacks were announced immediately
after the gold's recovery.
Others said they feared the incoming administration would
make major cuts in Fire Department personnel, using the Sept.
11 attack and the recession as excuses.
The role of the police at the Nov. 2 demonstration was an
eye-opener for rank-and-file firefighters-many of whom live in
the same suburban areas and even come from the same
families.
In their efforts to bolster the police, city officials have
for a long time promoted the notion of unity between these two
"uniformed services." But there is a big difference in their
social roles.
The police exist to "protect and serve" private property and
capitalist profits--the status quo. The firefighters got a
taste of what other union members have known for years: the
police are on the side of the bosses, not the workers.
Racism inhibits solidarity
The firefighters, on the other hand, fulfill a social
purpose of protecting people and buildings that will be needed
in any kind of society.
In fighting for justice against the Giuliani administration,
the firefighters would seem to have many natural allies in the
city-first and foremost, the communities of color that have
suffered so much police brutality and so many cutbacks under
his regime.
But many Black, Latino, immigrant and other workers have a
well-founded distrust of the firefighters. The Fire Department
has a long history of segregation in hiring and racism in its
interactions with the communities it serves-or, in some cases,
under-serves.
Unfortunately, firefighter unions and the rank and file have
often gone along with, or even been active proponents, of
racist policies.
Only 2.8 percent of the city's fire fighters are African
American--a few hundred out of the department's 11,300 members,
according to the Vulcan Society, a Black firefighters' group
(www.vulcansocietyfdny.org). There are only 30 women
firefighters; most of the very few women who manage to get
hired find themselves driven out of the Fire Department by
relentless hostility, threats, and demeaning sexist
treatment.
According to Vulcan Society President Paul Washington, the
number of Black firefighters has dropped since Giuliani took
office in 1994, after inching up slowly in the previous decade.
The group had been planning a lawsuit to force the department
to hire more workers of color. That legal action is on hold for
now.
Twelve Black firefighters died on Sept. 11. Only one of
their bodies has been recovered. Former Mayor David
Dinkins--the city's first Black mayor, who was driven from
office thanks to a racist campaign by Giuliani and the
police--was the keynote speaker at a Nov. 11 Vulcan Society
memorial.
Vulcans vs. killer cop
Black New Yorkers and all progressive people were outraged
earlier this year when the Fire Department agreed to train and
hire Edward McMellon. McMellon was one of the four cops who
shot and killed Amadou Diallo, a young, unarmed West African
immigrant, in a hail of 41 bullets in February 1999. All four
cops were acquitted.
The Vulcan Society campaigned against McMellon's hiring, but
received no support from the unions. McMellon graduated from
training and officially became a firefighter on Nov. 2--the
same day that protesters and cops clashed in lower
Manhattan.
In a Daily News opinion piece May 3, Washington wrote: "As a
firefighter with a police background, McMellon would qualify to
become, within a few short years, a fire marshal. A fire
marshal carries a gun and enforces the law with the same
authority as police officers. We have already seen how McMellon
enforces the law. We don't need to see it again."
Washington continued: "A Black man arrested and tried for
murder, no matter what the circumstances, would never be hired
as a firefighter.
"Now we face the prospect of being forced to train, work and
live with a man involved in one of the worst police killings of
a Black man in memory. ... Apparently, a white man who has been
arrested and tried for murder, who is reviled by millions and
who is on restricted duty in his present job is qualified to be
a firefighter, while very few Blacks and members of other
minority groups are.
"With the mayor and fire commissioner holding such
attitudes, should we believe it's just a coincidence that the
only thing whiter than Mayor Giuliani's City Hall is the Fire
Department?" he concluded.
The clash between firefighters and cops at ground zero was a
significant crack in the facade of "national unity" under the
bosses' leadership.
But if firefighters really want to honor their lost members
and preserve their jobs, they should extend a hand of
solidarity to other unions, and to the working-class
communities they serve. They should join the Vulcan Society in
its fight for the inclusion of more workers of color and women
in their ranks.
And the firefighters should question whether the Afghan
war--promoted by the same bosses who treated them callously--is
really in their interest.
Reprinted from the Nov. 22, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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