By Linda Willing
Firefighters frequently refer to work as being like home. They talk of their coworkers as family and their stations as their second homes. For some, the fire station is their place of greatest comfort and acceptance.
It's easy to see why many firefighters would feel this way. Fire stations often look like houses, with the TVs, kitchens, and recliner chairs. Firefighters eat meals and sleep at work. They are often extremely close with their coworkers, sharing intense experiences with them and literally trusting their lives to the others.
In some cases, firefighters spend more time at work and with their coworkers than they do at home with their real families.
But the fire station is not home, and blurring the distinction between the two places has been the source of all kinds of trouble for individuals and organizations alike. If, as the saying goes, a man's home is his castle, and the fire station is another home, then it is easy to conclude that the same freedoms that come with being at home also apply to being at the fire station.
Harassment classes
Years ago, when I would teach sexual harassment classes to firefighters, someone would inevitably raise his hand and say, "This law violates my First Amendment right to freedom of expression." Others in the room would nod in assent. "Oh really?" I would respond. "So you're saying it was just by accident that you all came to work dressed alike today?"
Requiring someone to wear a uniform is a clear impostition on someone's freedom of expression through their manner of dress. But does an employer have a right to require that? No firefighter would argue otherwise.
The First Amendment has been around for hundreds of years, and a lot of attorneys still make a good living trying to figure out exactly how it applies to all aspects of day-to-day life. But one thing is certain — the First Amendment has never applied the same to the workplace as it does to private life.
An important recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court (Garcetti v. Ceballos) has further limited the coverage public workers have in terms of personal expression.
Most people in other jobs understand this pretty well. They talk about "work-life separation" in a way that is foreign to many firefighters. The firehouse is different from working in an office or a store. But it is not completely different, and ultimately, the same laws apply.
Potential conflict
Beyond legal considerations is just the potential conflict between professionalism and feeling at home. There isn't necessarily a conflict here, but the slope can get slippery very fast. Joking around in the workplace is okay, but there are limits.
Those limits may not be as obvious when the relationships with coworkers are more familial than professional. Because of the work environment, the boundaries on acceptable workplace behavior are already stretched.
It doesn't take much to push those limits further and further until one day everyone is doing something really inappropriate at work (like sexual activity, or going to bars with the fire truck, or making inappropriate videos while in uniform — all of which have occurred recently on career fire departments.)
At that point, people are shocked. How could this happen? These were good firefighters — what were they thinking? To some degree, the answer is simple. They forgot they were at work.
The home-like environment of the fire station (including the lack of clear direction from those in leadership positions) allowed firefighters to believe they were on their own time and that they had freedoms not supported in the workplace.
Effective leadership is critical for keeping personal and group behavior at work from going too far. The home-like atmosphere complicates the role of company officers as they move back and forth all day between being a peer with their coworkers (cooking meals, choosing TV shows) and being in charge.
This conflict between being in charge and being "one of the guys" will be the subject of next month's column. But the first step in preventing bad outcomes is clear: recognizing that there truly is no place like home. And as much as the fire station might feel like home, it simply isn't.
