We received an email the other day from Jim F., a reader in Canada who is retiring soon at age 55, but is concerned by the fact that the next recruit school will include somebody who is 51 years old.  Knowing as he does, how demanding the job is and how hard it is on your body when you get past the 50-mark, he wonders if it’s “a smart, safe, intelligent investment in the changing of the guard?”

He adds further:  “Late-hires have physical and mental deterioration as we all age at approximately the same rate.  Valuable training, experience learning,  and on the job mentoring are lost due to limited time as retirement at 65 is mandatory.”  Our correspondent would like to know if anybody else shares his skepticism about late-age hires.

In the U. S. maximum age limits for hiring in F.D.’s were pretty much eliminated 20 or more years ago by equal-opportunity laws and before long we were seeing the occasional gray-beard coming into the fire/rescue service.  I recall early on when one of our recruits, a young man was doing so well and enjoying the recruit school so much that his own father joined up and entered a later school.  And then before long, we started seeing some firefighters who had recently retired from a fire department elsewhere and started all over again at our department, beginning a second career doing the same thing they were before, but adding a 2nd paycheck while they’re doing it.

Naturally the first response to all this was the physical ability of middle-aged people to start out on such a demanding career and the answer was given that with our semi-annual physical fitness testing and annual medical testing, that anybody who could maintain their physical standards were the same as anybody else.  But that really isn’t the point of the argument.  The consideration should be whether it’s worth the large investment that’s put into a new employee for somebody who will only be around for a few years.

Public safety work, such as fire and police services, tends by its nature to be a “career job” where people join up and stay in the same organization throughout their entire working life.  So in most cases, it is well worth the expenditure from the local government to sustain a recruit’s salary and other expenses, such as clothing, while they receive their basic training.  The overall cost of a recruit’s first year on the job is quite large with very little immediate return.  In my own department, the recruit school alone lasts about 24 weeks.  When  you are paying salaries and benefits for 20 to 30 people for half a year along with the costs of training them, that is a heavy financial burden on the taxpayer.

Normally that is considered to be an acceptable cost to prepare somebody who is likely to return the favor by performing for the next 25 to 35 years.  But how about the recruit who is already in his 50′s?  There is no question about their lack of probability of returning the taxpayers’ large investment in their position in a measurable way.  It just ain’t gonna’ happen.

Jim thinks there should be a consideration to changing Canada’s Human Rights Commission’s standards to place a reasonable upper-limit on entry level ages for certain occupations like “firefighter” as a means of protecting this investment and allowing for the full growth of a firefighter into the job which, as we all know, calls for continued learning for several years.

We’d like to hear some other opinions on this politically-sensitive issue, so let us know what you think about it.  If you’ve had any relevant experiences with this situation, tell us that, too.  Is it really a problem that needs to be addressed in some way, or is it no big deal?  What about the people who are really paying for this policy?  When tight economic times roll around periodically like we’re having now, wouldn’t it be better to not lose your firefighters to early retirements, or do you consider it to be a painless way to reduce the workforce?  What do you think?

I think we’d better get this equipment checked out now.  This apparatus has to last longer than we do.  But I’ll get the coffee started to help out our longevity.  See you back in the day room.