This summer, in the worst fire season of the last 30 years in Spain, hundreds of forest firefighters face the fire side, although with very different wages and working conditions depending on the region, and often marked by precariousness. In the most extreme cases, the remuneration can even triple, as is the case between the forest firefighters of the Graf de Catalunya, with a salary of 3,600 euros per month, and those who work for the Junta de Castilla y León through subcontracted companies, with a salary of about 1,170 euros per month.
“The Castilla y León is third world,” says Jorge Nieto, state coordinator of CCOO environmental agents, with almost half of his privatized staff.
“The collective of forest firefighters, even within the same autonomous community, is totally heterogeneous. It depends for the administration you work to, the company for which you work, if you depend directly on the Autonomous Community, or on the Diputación, on a joint, a City Council … if you are working in a public company, if you are the labor staff of the Board … it is a disaster Public services. Within the public company Tragsa (a means of the administration that works for the State or the Autonomous Communities) there are also different conditions, depending on who is the Contracting Administration and its tenders.
These differences have been present in many examples these days in the fires that Castilla y León, Galicia and Extremadura have devastated, mainly, which have required the deployment of a multitude of reinforcements to help the extinction devices of these three autonomous communities. From the support of other urban firefighters, forest firefighters of the BRIF's body (of the Ministry of Ecological Transition, hired through Tragsa), professionals from the UME and Brigades of Forest Firefighters displaced from other autonomous communities, such as those who have sent the Government of Catalonia in the fire of Jarilla In Extremadura, among others.
Salaries of 3,000 euros a month apart
“When you go there, you join a device, you work side by side with the rest of the classmates, whether they are from the same administration or another,” explains Javier García Rodríguez, firefighter of the BRIF and federal head of Forest Firefighters of UGT Public Services. However, the different conditions appear on many occasions, and “condition the work and organization of the emergency,” he warns.
Based on Ávila, Javier García Rodríguez has been deployed with his BRIf brig in Cáceres fires these days. There, forest firefighters of the Board of Extremadura, of the Infoex device, are mainly public workers. “Almost all are labor personnel, there are some who are fixed six -month -old discontinuous and others who work twelve months,” he says. His salaries “around 1,400 euros per month,” says Carlos (fictional name), forest firefighter of the Board of Extremadura.
On the other hand, in the State BRIs “a forest firefighter without being a foreman, or technical, or anything, charges around 26,000 euros a year,” explains Javier García Rodríguez. That is, about 1,860 euros per month. Almost 500 euros more. The difference is much greater if compared to Firefighters deployed in Extremadura by the Generalitatwhich in the case of grafs have a remuneration of 3,600 euros per month. More than 2,000 euros difference with the staff of the Board of Extremadura.
In Galicia, there are even lower remuneration. “There are forest firefighters charging between 1,000 and 1,100 euros, the ones that less, in some municipalities,” explains Alejandro Rodríguez, coordinator of Environmental Agents of Galicia de CCOO, which adds that they often work only “with three months of contract.” The average charged by a forest firefighter of the Xunta de Galicia, without seniority, “around 1,300 and 1,400 euros,” adds Rodríguez.
In this community, the bulk of forest firefighters is public personnel dependent on the Xunta, to which firefighters of the municipal brigades are added, “which can have very different wages a municipality of another”, which also support the supramunicipal emergency groups, such as the firefighters of the regional parks, also with their own conditions and allegations of precariousness.
The BRIF have just updated the agreement signed with Tragsa and the Ministry of Ecological Transition, which has substantially increased the remuneration of this body, with the recognition of more functions, such as intervention in other emergencies, such as the DANA. These state firefighters also have a contract all year. “They are working conditions that have been falling by their own weight and that we have been fighting for 20 years. We are happy with the agreement, but we do not settle. It is not that in the BRIF we have very good conditions, it is that the rest are very bad,” Marcos Gómez Carpenter, president of the BRIF Workers Association, considers.
Sometimes, differences in working conditions reach other basic working conditions, such as overnight stays and breaks in displacements, explains Javier García Rodríguez. “In the Dana de Valencia, we were many forest firefighters supporting. As a member of the BRIF, I went to a hotel to rest, but had companions from other bodies, also dependent on tragsa, who went to sports center in which they carried their own sleeping bags, and when they arrived at night to rest they had no bag because they had taken it away, something we denounced. These things happen and continue to happen,” In Tragsa they respond that “they do not know that this situation has occurred.”
Castilla y León, focus of inequality and privatization
Castilla y León, the focus of several of the worst fires of this summer (and since there are records), such as those of León and Zamora, is indicated as an “extreme case” of privatization and employment inequality among forest firefighters who work in the territory, says the head of UGT. “You cannot have a good device with six different types of contracting, denouncing Jorge Nieto, CCOO and environmental agent in the community.
On the one hand, the community that governs Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, has “20% of official and labor personnel”, explains Nieto, to which 40% of firefighters that are hired by the public company Tragsa and “another 40% distributed in some 30 private companies” is added. “Then we have, to curl the curl, collaboration agreements of the Junta de Castilla y León with municipalities or joints,” adds the trade unionist.
The head of CCOO explains that forest firefighters are those that worse working and salary conditions have, with a salary per agreement of 1,171 euros per month, and with less months of work than the rest. “It depends on the companies for which they work, but there are contracts of five months a year, of six …”, says Jorge Nieto, which above all attracts attention to “the lack of experience” of these outsourced contracts. As shown, highlights the job offer published through Infojobs by the Orthem company in which they were looking for Five non -experience fire extinction pawns to face León's fires.
These urgent ads to add personnel are due to vacancies without covering due to poor working conditions and low stability of contracts, as well as the “poor management of the bag” of firefighters of the Junta de Castilla y León, considers Nieto, which implies that there is necessary to find personnel from zero and urgently before the emergencies. “If you do not work in the world of extinction, detection and prevention of forest fires 12 months of the year, there is a very important human capital that goes to us. What in other sectors call brains escape, the same thing happens to us here. Because obviously it cannot be professional if you do not live from your profession,” argues Javier García Rodríguez (UGT).
The lack of experience is not only a challenge for the quality of the fire extinguishing device, but for the safety of workers who face it. “On a personal level, a three -month inexperienced brigade comes to me and I can't put them in the front line of fire. As responsible for the fire, for me they are more a concern. So I have to try to leave them in the second line and put more expert people in the front line,” explains Alejandro Rodríguez, who works as an environmental agent since the 90s in Galicia.
These days, all contacted forest firefighters say that the maximum of 12 hours of work is also being exceeded. “There are cases of 20 -hour days,” says both Jorge Nieto (CCOO) and Javier García Rodríguez (UGT), the result of the “lack of personnel”, because the next retainer does not arrive to replace the previous one. “This cannot be the mode of operationwe are not talking about a day in an exceptional way, we talk about weeks, of an ordinary thing. This cannot be, it goes against the security and health of the staff, ”says García Rodríguez.
