During the Government Shutdown in 2013 I was a Fire Battalion Chief who supervised 9 Fire Prevention Technicians on the Kern River Ranger District of the Sequoia National Forest in California. I wont go into the details that surround a Federal Furlough, because that could be multiple articles in itself and it has been well covered in the last few years.
What I am writing about now is a little morale kick that was implied by my then supervisors. One was a District Ranger and the other a District Fire Management Officer.
You see, it’s the little things that slowly wreck your people. The shutdown happened in October which was a particularly slow part of the 2013 fire season in CA. There was a lot of back and forth throughout the ranks as we all sought information on how to guide our subordinates throughout the very confusing situation.
We knew one thing for sure, we had no idea when we would get paid again. Most of the employees were sent home during the furlough but employees who were responsible for certain things like emergency services had to stick around and report for free each day. There is always talk and promises that you will get paid in the future, but you never know for certain.
That being said, in times like these there is very little you can do to care for your people and maintain what little morale remains. Sometimes you fake it as a supervisor and put on a smile, hoping they will feel a little bit better about a frustrating time. As you can see in the following emails I asked permission for one of my employees who had requested leave previous to the furlough. It was now mandatory to run all such requests through the District Ranger. Thankfully he approved that request, but then him and my first line supervisor found a way to crush what little hope the firefighters had.
They were all made “unavailable” for off unit assignments. It may not seem like a big deal but to those in Federal Wildland Fire its a huge deal. Assignments to emergency incidents are their bread and butter. They were already being forced to come to work for free, then being told they could only drive their vehicles to emergencies and not “patrol” as discussed below. The duties suggested by the patrols on their units during the furlough were not acceptable actions during the shutdown.
For some chest puffing, random soul crushing reason these two supervisors decided to lock all my employees down and not even give them the hope of being ordered for an assignment. Then it was mentioned in their reply that it was very unlikely they would even get ordered to an incident since it was slow time of year. So why in the heck make them unavailable in the first place??? Insert me pulling my hair out here. It just didn’t make any sense to take away even a false sense of hope for firefighters in this situation. There was clearly nothing to gain from it besides a clear statement of power.
The most painful piece of this email chain is the clear statement by the District Ranger aka supervisor, manager, administrator etc. etc. that fire/emergency assignments, family medical leave or annual leave could seriously jeopardize their mission”.
Looking back I wish I would have made a stronger point regarding the Rangers statement about family medical leave. It makes me sick to my stomach even now to read. Small insights like this were more telling than I realized at the time. I worried my written words to him would be wasted yet I hoped that by focusing on the business aspect I could shift his intent.
I did what I could to fight for my folks, though as usual it fell on deaf ears and probably made them treat my employees even worse via retaliation. However I couldn’t stop standing up and pointing out what I believed was right. Maybe sometimes it was too much, maybe not enough, maybe the wrong approach. I don’t know.
This was yet another kick to sinking workplace morale that never had to happen.
