After years of material under-funding and progressive loss of cash, updating the model of volunteer firefighters in Catalonia is not being easy. The Department of the Interior put on the table a proposed regulation, and the representatives of the group, a series of demands, some of them historic, which are now being negotiated and which will be debated again at the Council meeting scheduled for September. Earlier, at the end of this month, the group’s representatives will meet with the Minister of the Interior to present their claims.
The department maintains that the contractual relationship with the volunteer firefighters – a demand from the collective – is impossible, “because it is illegal”, but it proposes other forms of compensation for these units and insists that in order to be civil servants, the firefighters volunteers must appear in calls and their experience is recognized at the end of the process as merit. Some merits that some sectors of the group believe could have more weight in the score. During the last few years, in the calls for professional firefighters – of 250 places each year – an average of twenty volunteer firefighters have applied.
“We must also improve the suitability of the parks and go into detail about the needs of each one because not all the territory has the same characteristics or needs”, maintains Jordi Puigdomenech, representative of the Council of Volunteer Firefighters of the northern metropolitan region.
The Generalitat’s proposal to incorporate 753 volunteer firefighters to achieve the goal of an average of 31 firefighters per park satisfies the group, which questions, however, the access and training by levels established by the proposal of the department. The negotiation of material resources and investments in each park are other topics on the table, since the needs and activity in a park in the metropolitan region are different from those in a park in the Pyrenees.
The other section that has generated controversy in recent weeks is the working relationship of the volunteers with the Generalitat. The Administration alleges that the regulations do not allow any type of employment relationship, neither part-time nor full-time: “There cannot be people doing the same task with a different employment regime”, maintain Interior sources, who they insist on the altruistic nature of volunteering and, at the same time, the need to maintain this mixed model of professionals and volunteers to guarantee the management of emergencies. What is being considered are new and more compensation mechanisms.
One of the proposals put forward by the Generalitat is to make contributions to a savings fund (similar to a pension plan) for annually maintaining the status of volunteer firefighter and for the dedication to service shown. The department wants to bid for this incentive next year, the figures and conditions of which are being studied and the levels of coverage in case of serious accidents and disqualifications are also being reviewed. The Federation of Volunteer Firefighters, which polled the collective to initiate mobilizations against the proposal formulated by the Generalitat, is now waiting for the meeting with the councilor and to see how the negotiations progress.
