SWAMPSCOTT — Fires aren’t the only thing that the Fire Fighters Union Local 1459 battle.
Jim Snow, president of the union, said “Local 1459 Swampscott Fire Fighters Union has been at odds with the town and fire chief for almost three years now and would like to settle our issues and move forward.”
Currently, the Local 1459 is the only union in Swampscott without a contract, to Snow’s knowledge.
“We’ve had numerous issues that arose during the pandemic which the union felt was not in our job description to do, but given everyone in the world was making sacrifices, we would too and accept those changes,” said Snow. “However, our number one issue is manpower. That is our safety net and the town violated our contract and twice reduced our manning in the winter months. We are in negotiations attempting to settle those two issues.”
In 1963, the union applied to the International Association of Fire Fighters for a charter. In 1967, the union was recognized by the town as the bargaining representative for employees of the fire department, excluding the fire chief.
Graham Archer became the fire chief in December 2019. Snow says “Prior to Archer, the union did not have a grievance end up at arbitration in over 10 years. In the last years, we have had three grievances go to arbitration. Arbitration costs the town and union each side over $6,000 per arbitration case so it’s not cheap to have our disputes settled by an independent party.”
“Also, in the spring of 2020, the town administrator decided to move to remove both police and fire departments from civil service,” added Snow. “That has been over a two year battle to negotiate the replacement language. We were set to have a Department of Labor Relations (DLR) investigative hearing yesterday [July 27] on the issue of whether the town bargained in bad faith with us. We had filed a complaint in June. We agreed to postpone in an attempt to settle our differences. We had a productive meeting but no agreement was reached yesterday, but we made progress toward a possible settlement of our two manning reduction cases, the civil service hiring dispute, as well as a new three year contract.”
Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald said that he’s “eager as always to find common ground.”
Fitzgerald echoed Snow’s statement about the fire department’s removal, saying “we’re transitioning the fire department out of civil service.”
Fitzgerald also pointed out how the fire department recently hired two Black employees as well as two women employees, saying that he’s “grateful to work with the union to promote diversity.”
“We are hopeful we can settle the two manning reduction cases as well as the hiring issue and ink a successor Collective Bargaining Agreement that covers the next three years shortly,” said Snow.
Dorothy Irrera can be reached at [email protected].
