Are we providing the correct anti-discrimination training?
We believe that the American fire service is a multicultural, multi-racial entity. It consists of mainly white men, a few women, and a few minorities. [i] Litigation in the fire service focuses primarily on discrimination, harassment, and retaliation against people of color and women. Some lawsuits are related to operational issues, but people issues are the main focus of litigation.
In personnel cases of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, the plaintiffs are awarded significant judgments. Many cases settle out of court, and a few are entered into the court records, such as those that went to trial and a judgment was recorded. Sometimes, the plaintiff firefighters retain their jobs, but in many cases, they retire.
Does this litigate-rinse-and-repeat process solve current issues facing our firefighters today, especially in the personnel arena? Is litigation correcting future behavior?
As an attorney and former deputy fire chief, I have always advocated that there could never be enough training to deal with our personnel and how we treat each other in the fire stations. Sometimes, litigation occurs from off-duty events like stalking or harassing, setting up two firefighters or more due to their failure to understand boundaries and the fire department’s inability to take meaningful action to protect their employees.
Many training programs are available for fire departments to teach employees how to act in any workplace to prevent harassment, retaliation, and discrimination claims. These programs often address the issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which have recently become so politicized that many governmental agencies, corporations, educational institutions, and fire departments are afraid to even talk about them in those terms.
So, I will mention those three training sources of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, better known as DEI training.
If there were a simple solution and we could take everything to a classroom and learn what we need to learn, including changing attitudes and behaviors, it would not address what your firefighters bring to work with them, learned from their parents, their religion, their community, their education, and their own beliefs and biases, which may be a difficult obstacle to overcome.
What is DEI?
Diversity refers to variety within the organizational workforce, such as in identity and identity politics. It includes gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, disability, class, etc.), age, or opinion. [ii] Equity refers to concepts of fairness and justice, such as fair compensation and substantive equality. [iii] More specifically, equity usually also includes focusing on societal disparities and allocating resources and “decision-making authority to groups that have historically been disadvantaged” and taking “into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the result is equal.” [iv] Finally, Inclusion refers to creating an organizational culture that creates an experience where “all employees feel their voices will be heard” (IBID) and a sense of belonging and integration. [v, vi]
DEI training incorporates the principles of diversity, which is embracing the difference that everyone brings to the table, whether it’s race, age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, or other aspects of social identity. The training also incorporates the concept of equity and, in some cases, equality, where the organization and its members treat everyone fairly and equitably and provide equal opportunities. Inclusion is the last piece of the DEI training, and it’s termed as respecting everyone’s voice and creating a culture where people from all backgrounds feel encouraged to express their ideas and perspectives.
These concepts are essential in a profession where teamwork is paramount to safety, and everyone returns home after every shift or after every call; creating a cooperative environment that respects one another again can be brought to the rank and file by the leadership who must endorse those principles creating a safe working environment both in the fire station and out on the street.
Onboarding Candidates
Departments begin these programs when a candidate applies for a position within their department. Screening individuals for these traits involves application, testing, and interviews before bringing someone on board your department. In many departments, the candidates’ social media sites are reviewed to ensure there is no history of racial bias or animus towards others or opinions or positions that may make it difficult for this individual or other individuals to succeed in an organization.
My cohort attorneys and I have always postulated that policy, training, and enforcement are essential to creating a legally safe workplace. Fire training occurs in a department as its members attempt to keep themselves safe on the job with skill evaluations, frequent ground training opportunities, and actual calls. Likewise, diversity training and litigation prevention occur in the fire station. Like field training and responses, the department adopts a curriculum and hires an instructor to conduct department-wide DEI and safety seminars to keep our employees safe from adverse working conditions, sometimes originating from other firefighters.
Controversy
DEI training has become mainstream in the national corporate makeup and the public sector. It has also become highly politicized in some states, which ban DEI training in their corporate and educational institutions.
For a majority of employed U.S. adults (56%), focusing on increasing DEI at work is a good thing, according to a Pew Research Center Survey. [vii]
However, opinions about DEI vary considerably along demographic and political lines. Most workers have some experience with DEI measures at their workplace. According to Pew Research, about six-in-ten (61%) workers say their company or organization has policies that ensure fairness in hiring, pay, or promotions, and 52% say they have training or meetings on DEI at work.
Employees say their workplace has a staff member who promotes DEI (33%), offers salary transparency (30%), and has affinity groups or employee resource groups based on a shared identity (26%). The majority of those with access to these measures say each has positively impacted where they work.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are organizational frameworks that promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people,” particularly groups “historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination” based on identity or disability. These three notions (diversity, equity, and inclusion) represent “three closely linked values” that organizations seek to institutionalize through DEI frameworks.[viii]
What Are the Origins of DEI Training?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex, color, and national origin. It also banned segregation in public places, like public schools and libraries.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which works to eliminate employment discrimination. Employees began filing discrimination lawsuits with the EEOC in the 1960s and ‘70s. According to a 2008 report published in the Academy of Management Learning & Education, many companies began incorporating diversity into their business strategies by providing diversity training.
DEI policy emerged from affirmative cction in the United States. The legal term “affirmative action” was first used in Executive Order No. 10925, signed by President John F. Kennedy on March 6, 1961. This order included a provision that government contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination.
Although the two concepts may seem similar, affirmative action is different from DEI because it requires federal contractors to treat all applicants and employees equally based on race, color, religion, and sex.
Colleges and universities also used affirmative action to boost enrollment of students of color at majority-white schools; however, recently, the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action, ruling that race-conscious college admissions were unconstitutional.
After President Ronald Reagan backed corporate deregulation policies that said companies should address discrimination internally in the 1980s, Dominique Hollins (founder of the DEI consulting firm WĒ360) said some diversity efforts lost momentum. In the decades to follow, Hollins said many companies continued to push for DEI-focused jobs and training in a “piecemeal” fashion instead of creating ongoing programs and dedicated teams.
In September 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which required government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Neither the executive order nor The Civil Rights Act authorized group preferences.
However, affirmative action in practice would eventually become synonymous with preferences, goals, and quotas as upheld or struck down by Supreme Court decisions, even though no law had been passed explicitly permitting discrimination in favor of disadvantaged groups. Some state laws expressly banned racial preferences, and in response, some laws have failed to attempt to legalize racial preferences explicitly.
What’s DEI’s purpose?
DEI has its roots in the 1960s anti-discrimination legislative movement when laws like the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 addressed labor issues based on protected classes.
Companies had to comply with these anti-discrimination laws, and the DEI movement stems from these efforts to continue to create equitable workplaces and schools. “Somewhere around the late ’80s, early ’90s, people are realizing that simply trying to stop discriminating against different groups of people is not enough,” Erica Foldy (professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service) said. “The kind of ethos of those initiatives was to go beyond just avoiding discrimination and actively changing organizations to be more welcoming and inclusive.” Foldy says that although the DEI acronym is in the spotlight, these initiatives are implemented under various acronyms or names.
DEI Initiatives
Experts say that every DEI initiative may be run differently, but the overall goal is to make companies and leaders examine the way their companies treat or serve marginalized groups. “Historically, there have been some groups of people who have had more access and control over resources, money, time, other people, and the ability to affect policies, procedures, and law,” said Dr. Tina Opie, the founder of Opie Consulting Group (OCG), experience in strategic management and organizational behavior.
Opie and Foldy say DEI can make people uncomfortable because they feel that correcting power inequities can be seen as “unfair” to those with power or privilege. “Dominance and privilege – understandably, those things are hard to give up,” Foldy said. “For the greater good, of not just a workplace, but for our country, our democracy, we have to become a country that equally and passionately welcomes all the people who live in the country.” Opie and Foldy believe critics of DEI often frame these initiatives as unfairly giving something to marginalized people who some say “have not earned” it and are taking things away from others.
According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, DEI is about something other than hitting diversity hiring quotas since such quotas are illegal. Instead, DEI professionals say it’s about breaking barriers so all people have the opportunity to thrive in schools and the workplace. Opie argues that some critics see diversity as a “them” issue, not an “us” issue affecting collective society.
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020 sparked a racial reckoning and a renewed push for creating DEI leadership roles and initiatives at major corporations, and between 2019 and 2022, according to a LinkedIn analysis, chief diversity and inclusion officer roles grew by 168.9%.
Despite the backlash against DEI programs and initiatives, many companies support DEI.
A survey published by the polling firm Ipsos found that 67% of people surveyed said their employers require or offer training, lectures, webinars, or resources on DEI, and 71% said they think DEI training is important to “creating a positive workplace culture.”
Challenges
According to DEI frameworks, “equity is different from equality in that equality implies treating everyone as if their experiences are the same.” A common identification, especially among critics, is of equality as “equality of opportunities” and “equality of outcome.” [ix-x]
Some have criticized this focus on equity rather than equality, arguing that the former contradicts an emphasis on merit or non-discrimination. Political scientist Charles Lipson has called “equity” a “mandate to discriminate,” threatening the principle of “equality under the law.” In contrast, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a frequent critic of DEI, has called equity “the most egregious, self-righteous, historically ignorant and dangerous” of the three titular notions of DEI. [xi]
Daniel Oppong, founder of The Courage Collective, a consultancy advising companies on DEI, said DEI was created because marginalized communities have only sometimes had equal job opportunities or felt a sense of belonging in majority-White corporate settings. “That is the genesis of why some of these programs exist,” he said. It attempted to create workplaces where more or all people can thrive.”
Fire Service Investment
What does DEI look like at work?
Today, studies show that many companies are prioritizing some form of DEI. According to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center, 61% of U.S. adults say their workplace has policies that focus on fairness in hiring, promotions or pay. And 56% of U.S. adults say, “Focusing on increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion at work is good.” Kelly Baker, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Thrivent, an organization that provides financial advice, said DEI in the workplace could be a mix of employee training, resource networks, and recruiting practices. Her company, for example, has resource groups for women in leadership, young professionals, Black employees, Hispanic employees, and military veterans, among others. She said that their DEI training teaches employees how to understand and bridge cultural differences in the workplace. Thrivent also seeks job candidates with diversity in their race, geography, gender, and industry background, Baker said.
Experts say many corporations tie DEI to their business strategies. Diversity “is related to our business growth strategy,” Baker said. “It’s pragmatic and essential and critical for us to ensure that our client base reflects the world that we are in and the world that we are going to be in.” “Having a diverse workforce representative of your stakeholders is good for business.” Equity” focuses on fairness and justice, mainly referring to compensation. Whether people are being paid or treated fairly, “Inclusion” is about whether people feel like they belong and feel heard or valued in an organization.
Remember, according to Foldy, DEI initiatives focus on three main areas: training, organizational policies and practices, and organizational culture. According to Tina Opie, a DEI consultant and professor at Babson College, initiatives focusing on policies, practices, and culture are intended to correct organizational inequities. This could look like implementing accessibility measures for people with disabilities, addressing discriminatory hiring practices and pay inequity, holding anti-bias trainings, and more.
DEI practice has been around for decades, although we have yet to identify it in that manner.
The International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) and the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) are invested in DEI Training and offer guidelines on intent and training for its members, as well as guidelines and a worksheet for recruiting a diverse fire service.
Many departments have invested time and instructional personnel in anti-discrimination, anti-harassment, and anti-retaliation programs, developing policies and procedures that follow both state and federal law for their departments.
Is the Fire Service Required to Teach DEI? What DEI Training Is Not
There are no current laws mandating DEI training for fire departments. It is a voluntary program that departments research and undertake to offer a level playing field and opportunity for their employees. However, developing a harassment, discrimination, and retaliation policy, training, enforcement, and continual oversight is not a panacea for workplace harassment and exclusion. Buy-in from your leadership is required to prevent workplace discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
Fire departments do have to comply with state and federal laws in these areas preventing these discriminatory acts.
A report Commissioned by the IAFC Volunteer Workforce Solutions [xii] titled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the U.S. Volunteer and Combination Fire-rescue Service found the respondents report various types of diversity within their departments. Many believe their department leaders act fairly, feel included, and believe in the value of various DEI initiatives.
However, according to the IAFD report, many respondents:
- Do not believe their department’s DEI initiatives have been effective.
- More than half of the respondents have had personal experience with discrimination, bullying and hazing in their department.
- Respondents from traditionally underrepresented groups in the fire service reported a less positive experience at their departments.
- Common misperceptions about DEI are still prevalent in the fire service.
DEI training is not litigation prevention training. It is a method to train your fighters about other members of your organization, including white, nonminority firefighters, to coexist and respect each other’s differences and similarities in a close relationship while at work and off duty. Many firefighters are encouraged by this type of training, and others are turned off as well.
The saying, “once a firefighter, always a firefighter” holds true for me. As a former fire service member and an attorney, I always encourage the means and methods to prevent any litigation in the fire service, especially those centered on personnel issues.
Endnotes
[i] Rita Fahy, Ben Evarts, and Gary P. Stein – osfdprofile.pdf @ U.S. fire department profile | NFPA Research
[ii] Alfonseca, Kiara (10 February 2023). “DEI: What does it mean and what is its purpose?” ABC News.
[iii] IBID
[iv] “What is diversity, equity, and inclusion?” McKinsey & Company. 17 August 2022.
[v] “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Definitions.” University of Washington.
[vi] “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.” Code for America.
[vii] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/
[viii] “What is diversity, equity, and inclusion?” McKinsey & Company.
[ix] Minow, Martha (21 September 2021). “Equality vs. Equity.” American Journal of Law and Equality. MIT. 1 (1): 167–193. doi:10.1162/ajle_a_00019. S2CID 240522063.
[x] “Diversity, equality and the law in the UK” (PDF). UK Parliament. Retrieved 26 March 2023
[xi] Peterson, Jordan (10 May 2019). “Jordan Peterson: When the left goes too far — the dangerous doctrine of equity”. The National Post.
[xii] iafc_dei_study_report_final.pdf
Other Resources
- IAFF – Members Only Access
- IAFC – Guide for Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Department (iafc.org)
- Drexel University – Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) in the Fire and Rescue Service | Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health
- Example of state-mandated training: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Training | Department of Enterprise Services (DES) (wa.gov)
- Volunteer Workforce Solutions – IAFC – DEI in the US Volunteer and Combination Fire Rescue Service. iafc_dei_study_report_final.pdf
- Harvard Business Review – Making U.S. Fire Departments More Diverse and Inclusive (hbr.org)
JOHN K. MURPHY, JD, MS. PA-C, EFO, deputy chief (ret.), has been a member of the career fire service since 1974, beginning his career as a firefighter and paramedic and retiring in 2007 as a deputy chief and chief training officer. He is a licensed attorney in Washington State since 2002 and a licensed physician’s assistant since 1977. Murphy consults with fire departments and public and private entities on operational risk management, response litigation, employment policy and practices liability, personal management, labor contracts, internal investigations and discipline, and personal injury litigation. He serves as an expert witness involving fire department litigation and has been involved in numerous cases across the country. He is a legal and management educator, frequent legal contributor to Fire Engineering, participant in Fire Service Court Radio, a blogger and a national speaker on fire service legal issues. He is a distance learning instructor with the University of Florida Fire and Emergency Services undergraduate program.
This commentary reflects the views of the author and not necessarily the views of Fire Engineering. It has not undergone the standard peer-review process, and should not be construed as legal advice or counsel.
