After wildland firefighter Ben McLane battled California’s deadliest wildfire, he began to second guess his job. The November 2018 Camp Fire near Paradise had killed 85 and destroyed 18,000 homes. McLane used to climb steep terrain and dig endless firebreaks. He was used to the spectacle of all the pine and fir flame hills. He wasn’t used to this scale of damage—or the feeling that he had worked for nothing. During that time, he rarely saw his family, and could not understand buying a house. Was the firefight justified?
McLane was second-guessing himself when he heard about Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit state firefighting organization founded in 2019 by former firefighters Luke Mayfield and Kelly Martin. Climate change has extended fire seasons by almost eight weeks, while development pressures mean more people are living in fire zones. Starting salaries were about $27,000 a year. The result was a result that made the job even more dangerous for anyone left. Even with more than half of the union’s firefighters involved, change felt far away.
“In our business, we look for the right tool for the right job,” said McLane, who stuck with the job, and began speaking publicly about his experience as a state firefighter in 2021. “[The union] it is not the right tool to be the true voice of wildland firefighters, because they represent all public servants. So it wasn’t a question of when a group like Grassroots would come.”
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Today, Grassroots Wildland firefighters represent a remarkable example of a growing movement among workers to organize outside the existing union structure. Some workers, such as those at Amazon and Trader Joe’s, choose to start their own union without contacting an existing one. Others, often those in “entertainment work” or immigrants who fear deportation, set up labor centers.
Federal wilderness firefighters fall into another category. Currently there are approximately 19,000 employed by the federal government, and approximately 10,000 in one organization, the National Federation of Federal Employees. (Another 9,000 state employees, as well as wildland firefighters employed by states, conservation groups and private firms, are classified as either union or non-union.) But like most other state employees, raises beyond annual increases must be authorized by law or administrative discipline— which takes political power, is often taken from the public’s attention.
As members of the National Federation of Federal Employees spread across government offices from the Department of Defense to the Passport Service, firefighters increasingly felt they needed to be heard if they wanted to see change. So far, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters—working closely with NFFE—has proven that point.
“Grassroots is very good at getting the message out to the general public,” said Max Alonzo, a former firefighter who was hired by the NFFE in 2020 to help the union’s global chapters with everything from communications to legal initiatives (and who was recently named the union’s national secretary-treasurer). “I don’t see that we would have reached where we are if they had not brought the whole country to these problems.”
Case in point: As Congress begins to consider a new pay cap for federal firefighters, whose starting wage is $15 an hour, the union and Grassroots Wildland Firefighters have organized front-line workers to meet with members of Congress and speak to the committee. hearing and press conference on Capitol measures. Grassroots volunteers talked about how they became the “forgotten first responders” who were forced to “live without their cars just to survive,” and their increased risk of lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health problems.
That’s something Luke Mayfield, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, knows all too well. After 18 years on the field, he battled pre- and post-season depression, anxiety attacks and, eventually, suicidal thoughts. “It seemed that the workers would be my priority for the next six months, while my wife and daughter took a back seat,” he said.
In early 2019, he quit the job. He helped found Grassroots Wildland Firefighters later that year.
Grassroots also encourages firefighters to speak out, connect with staff and the media and create guidelines on how to speak to reporters. Petitions and letter-writing campaigns are another major focus: the “Contact the Reps” campaign advocating for the passage of the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act received more than 12,000 letters.
The pressure has come with promising results: temporary pay supplements, which expire this September, currently translate into up to $20,000 a year. Although it wasn’t the permanent rule they were looking for, firefighters saw their annual starting salary nearly double, to $51,500.
The increase would have been more difficult if the firefighters had relied on the union alone, said Kelly Andersson, the newspaper’s editor. Wildfire Todaywho has worked in this field for more than twenty years. “The driving force behind raising awareness of firefighter pay issues and progress toward a solution is undoubtedly the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters,” he said. “They have been keeping these issues in front of the firefighters, their supporters and the public.”
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For all the attention paid to wildfires, there is little public discussion of the working conditions of the firefighters who put them out. It’s a concern to be exceeded, said Riva Duncan, vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and a 31-year veteran of the Forest Service. “No one understood my work,” he said. “My family still doesn’t really know what I did for a living. But we believe that you cannot talk about the wildfire problem without talking about firefighters.”
The work can be difficult and unusually demanding. Wildland employees are expected to act as a “national resource,” available to travel across the country at a few hours’ notice. When there is a fire, assignments last two weeks, with no days off, and shifts start from 6 am to 10 pm. They often sleep outside, near fire and smoke.
While crew chiefs are usually salaried and full-time, rank-and-file firefighters are often seasonal employees who make up part of the workforce. They typically work six months of the year, logging 800 to 1,200 hours of overtime during each fire—the equivalent of five to seven and a half months of full-time work. After the season, they lose their health insurance, and many seek part-time jobs to make ends meet.
The lack of benefits and job security has hampered both the recruitment and retention of quality workers, said Alonzo. The currency exchange problem is very urgent. In February 2023, US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said the agency had lost about 45% of its firefighters over the past three years. This year, the Forest Service said it met its hiring goals for the season, but also does not have “sufficient capacity to meet the needs of the wildfire crisis” in the long term.
“We’re understaffed all over the place,” said McLane, who leads the Forest Service’s firefighting team. McLane’s biggest concern is the loss of veteran firefighters. He said the result is a firefighting force with less experience and more dangerous working conditions. “He has high demands on the people who work in the fire department and very few of them are working,” he said. “The answer is like a death spiral.”
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This September, the wage supplements will expire without a conference, sending the union and Grassroots Wildland Firefighters into the organizing process, Duncan said. The groups want the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act, which would make the supplement permanent, and Tim’s Law, which would raise wages, expand mental health services and provide health insurance for seasonal workers. Both bills were introduced in Congress but made little progress.
As a backup, both groups are urging the Forest Service to make management changes that could make a difference. Counting part-time work for retirement benefits, including care for long-term health effects, providing time off during the fire season and increasing accident payouts are all improvements that can be handled within the agency. Without the need for congressional approval, this amendment would be easy to accomplish, Duncan said.
Advocates for Grassroots Wildland Firefighters note that there is still a long, uphill battle to secure the job changes they want. But McLane says the work of groups like Grassroots is one of the reasons he’s back on fire for the 2024 season. “That is one of the things provided by the Grassroots,” he emphasized. “It’s hope. Someone puts our story in a true light, and we’ve seen it make a difference.”
—Nathan Pipenberg, Capital & Main
This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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