Social Club Case Study

I will be commenting on how my department has changed and resisted change in the past ten years by showing case effect through these three factors socialisation by the fire hall, Fire chief personality and fire department goals. The Bathurst fire department has always been a social club and since it was a composite department many of our members came from every walk of life as volunteers, we had mill workers, news anchors ,managers of companies just to name a few. And most of these members had no intension of ever becoming career members they wanted to help the community and be part of a social club. This social club worked very well for the city it had 40 volunteers to support their 16 career firefighters .At any given time you had plenty …show more content…
We had a fire chief that was never a firefighter and had never come through our ranks. He was in constant conflict with the union, but he seemed able to keep his volunteer ranks fairly happy he still maintained 40 volunteers as I had mentioned earlier. Upon his retirement, many unionized members were relieved and were happy to see change coming. This new Chief was from the ranks and was receiving the department on a silver platter unfortunately he kicked the platter over and department moral was headed for an all-time low. He was a very educated man and number, budgeting, planning was his thing probably in a bigger department as a division chief in charge of anything but personnel would have been his forte. When it came to his fire crews it never went well he wasn’t a people person .He was very driven by saving money thus resulting in losing volunteers, losing respect from his people by slashing volunteer budgets and treating his people like they were inferior to him. With fire calls being low, younger union members wanted to do like so many departments across North America and turn towards EMS but this created resistance with the older generation which had the old saying “same money in here as it is out there”. This was fine with the chief he was in support of his older members because the more we were inside the hall the cheaper it was for him. He was in a constant battle with the union because contract negotiations between the city and the union were written in black and white, but he would always try to play on words to benefit him. The ranks were comprised of four captains, four lieutenants and eight firefighters plus our three to five holiday relief and our volunteers, but unfortunately in this chiefs eyes the four Captains were the only ones that mattered. If you weren’t a captain you weren’t worth much or yet that’s the image and the message he was