Fire Service Associations submit revised counterproposal

The Fire Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tions of the First and Sec­ond Di­vi­sions have joint­ly sub­mit­ted a re­vised coun­ter­pro­pos­al to the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer (CPO) for the 2020–2022 bar­gain­ing pe­ri­od.

The as­so­ci­a­tions said via Face­book through Pres­i­dent Keon Guy, the sub­mis­sion seeks to con­clude mat­ters al­ready agreed to in prin­ci­ple and se­cure par­i­ty with oth­er Pro­tec­tive Ser­vices on ar­eas in­clud­ing emer­gency med­ical tech­ni­cian (EMT) qual­i­fi­ca­tions, oc­cu­pa­tion­al safe­ty and health (OSH), in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) and oth­er spe­cialised qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

The pro­pos­al al­so seeks im­proved salaries, al­lowances and com­pen­sa­tion for ad­di­tion­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and spe­cialised du­ties, in­clud­ing dri­ving pro­fi­cien­cies, haz­ardous body re­cov­ery, fire in­spec­tion and in­ves­ti­ga­tion, and in­struc­tion­al du­ties.

The as­so­ci­a­tions have al­so pro­posed an on-call al­lowance for of­fi­cers re­quired to be on call while at­tached to sec­tions in­clud­ing en­gi­neer­ing, fire pre­ven­tion and train­ing.

Oth­er ar­eas ad­dressed in­clude med­ical ben­e­fits, hours of work, over­time and wel­fare pro­vi­sions, as well as pen­sion and Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Sys­tem (NIS) re­forms af­fect­ing serv­ing and re­tired of­fi­cers.

The as­so­ci­a­tions have al­so pro­posed a dis­place­ment al­lowance for of­fi­cers as­signed to Petrotrin sta­tions.

Guy said the sub­mis­sion rep­re­sent­ed an­oth­er step to­wards se­cur­ing what he de­scribed as fair, mod­ern and eq­ui­table terms and con­di­tions for fire of­fi­cers.