‘I Find it Daunting . . . That I’m Gonna Have to Deal with This until 60’: Extended Working Lives and the Sustainable Employability of Operational Firefighters

Abstract

While operational firefighters in the UK fire and rescue service traditionally retired in their 50s, their working lives are now extending. However, external pressures and the emotional and physical demands of firefighting work, lead to questions about whether operational firefighters will be able to extend their working lives. In this article, we engage with Van der Klink et al.’s sustainable employability model, which focuses on situations that allow individuals to make valuable contributions through their work and reveal how working lives can be extended. We consider implications of the characteristics of operational firefighting work, individual circumstances and contextual factors for the extension of working lives. Drawing on interviews conducted with firefighters, crew managers and watch managers working in a UK fire and rescue service, we highlight the unsustainability of many future working lives because of wellbeing and organisational pressures.

Italian Entertainment Professionals’ Sustainable Employability: What Factors to Consider? A Network Analysis

“…Overall, this result goes in the direction of recent literature review findings, depicting the important role of contingency factors at the interface between the worker and his/her environment, and in the relationship between job insecurity and workers' performance [47]. Furthermore, in line with previous studies detecting the importance of organizational policies for firefighters' SE [48] and for workers collaborating with robots [14], this result confirms the key role of conversion factors at the organizational level in fostering entertainment professionals' SE. In this sense, despite the study's limitations, such as the sample size, this finding contributes cracking the dominant discourse around the individual responsibility for SE of Italian entertainment professionals [20].…”