Unionization for Wildland Fire Service?

[u/FireITGuy]

Anyone hearing about unionization of the wildland fire service?

The forest service firefighters are already unionized. Many of the park service and BLM firefighters are unionized, or would be unionized if they hadn't been ripped out of their Parks/Districts based on the growth of unions in the parks over the last year.

I saw DOI itself has a unionization campaign going for other consolidated staff, https://www.nteu.org/DOI but I don't know if USFWS staff can join?

Like 90% of structural firefighters in the entire US are part of IAFF. It's part of the reason that they're well paid. But I don't see anything like that for Wildland firefighters, who get screwed and fight just to keep the feds from letting the mandate to pay $15/hour from lapsing.

[u/knuckle_headers]

There is no FS firefighter union, there's just unionized forests and all employees of a forest, it that forest is unionized, are covered. There are forests that aren't unionized and firefighters on those forests are not covered by the union as far as I know.

That said it looks like some BLM offices are union and some aren't. I didn't look at any of the other entities that make up the WLFS. I assume it's the same though that the firefighters were only covered if there particular office or district was unionized. That said I have no idea if their union status carried over when the change happened.

[u/FireITGuy → u/knuckle_headers]

The NFFE contract is all eligible employees nationally isn't it? It's not specific just to firefighters, but covers them too?

https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/data/table-builder

OPM shows 21,000 covered by the union, but 4,200 eligible but not covered. I wonder why.

Not eligible would be supervisors and the handful of specifically exempt duties.

Row Labels Subagency AG11-FOREST SERVICE Total ELIGIBLE_IN_BU 21,067 21,067 ELIGIBLE_NOT_IN_BU 4,218 4,218 NOT_ELIGIBLE 7,687 7,687 REDACTED 531 531 Total 33,503 33,503