Recently, Boston firefighters received a retroactive 19% pay raise in what is by all accounts, a very bad economy.  The raise was the result of a several year arbitration process which was not all a waste of time as firefighters learned that their union may have even more obscene influence than the police union and Boston’s mayor, Tom Menino, learned to spell “truck”.

The raise is so off putting to people like me in part because it comes at a time when politicians are cutting services for blind people, but also because in this case, the 19% raise was paid in exchange for the firefighters agreeing to the horribly intrusive requirement of random drug testing, which was prompted by recent event involving two on-duty firefighters, cocaine, alcohol, a fire, and dying.  The result of that experience, other than a funeral which drew firefighters from places as far away as the moon, was the finding by an internal investigation that the men who bravely stumbled into a fire while half-cocked, spent most of their lengthy stints in the firehouse getting hammered and that their behavior was more the rule than the exception.   

When all of the firefighters, or “Jakes” some people insist on calling them, returned from the funeral, they immediately began lobbying against the drug testing which they argued would limit their freedom, and definitely limit their ability to get buzzed while playing pinochle and waiting to retire at age 47. 

Even the people who didn’t give a crap about the drug stuff were exercised about a year ago when it came to light that Boston’s hard-working flame chasers were taking advantage of a loophole in their union contract which allowed them to get disability benefits at a higher wage than they’d ever earned simply by managing to get hurt while filling in for a supervisor.  Mysteriously, there were more than 100 incidents where men slipped and hurt their backs, apparently from the added stress of standing in for superior officers and instead of just paying men in their 20’s and 30’s to do nothing, the city began paying men in their 20’s and 30’s to participate in weight lifting contests and other athletic pursuits while recovering from their injuries.

In fairness to the union, they did manage to suspend Albert Arroyo (with pay of course) after he placed 8^th in an international body building competition while on such a medical leave.  In most jobs where giving a crap or doing your job or not being a criminal are important, Arroyo would have been playing pinochle in jail, but luckily for him, in his alternate union universe, he was afforded a thorough internal investigation which included Arroyo’s claim that his body building “helped him cope, emotionally and physically, with the travails and rigors of working as a firefighter”.

I was so disgusted that I never bothered to see if Arroyo was fired, or burned, as he should have been, or more likely, dismissed honorably to go and find a job in another state. 

The mayor was so outraged by the drugged/drunk suicide missions and the 100 or so jakes who were ultimately found to be engaging in gross abuse of taxpayer resources in the name of leasing large SUVs and taking vacations to Tampa, that he decided to engage in a highly effective game of “lethargic and unnecessarily agreeable cat and astonishingly convincing mouse” with the firefighters union which took the form of drawn out negotiations.

Last fall, Menino’s “tough stance” which included such outlandish demands as “not being drunk or on drugs”, caused the union’s grease ball leader to endorse Menino’s opponent.   In much the same way his inability to form sentences or be anything but a bozo in public has never taken away from his political appeal, the firemen’s impassioned defense of their right to drink while sitting around waiting for taxpayers’ houses to catch fire fell on mostly deaf ears. 

For people like me, Menino’s election signaled some kind of confusing voting palsy on the part of Bostonians, but also signaled what appeared to be the end of the road for criminal and dangerous conduct on the part of the city’s firemen.  It appears, however, in light of recent 19% retroactive raises, that I have either misjudged the impact of Menino’s win or grossly underestimated his fear of his house burning down and nobody coming to help him. 

If he’d asked me, I would have reminded him of the old Hebrew saying “’tis better to let it burn than get help from guys who’ve been drinking all day”.  If he'd asked nicely I would have even written in it crayon and read it to him.