Recently I was talking with one of my fire service colleagues about the economic problems it seems nearly all departments are facing. He said he was happy because at least for the time being, his department had managed to avoid position eliminations or other drastic measures in exchange for all members agreeing to a 4 percent pay cut across the board.

Now it’s surely a sign of the times that taking a 4 percent pay cut seems like a good thing, but his comment got me thinking. In my world of private-sector employment, such decisions are almost never an option. Salary and budgets cuts, promotional freezes and layoffs are generally decisions imposed on high, leaving line managers scrambling to keep up, and often feeling helpless and guilty as they’re forced to choose between two bad options.

But as we always talk about, the fire service operates much more like a family. When times are tough, functional families come together and make tough, but fair decisions that benefit all the members. It’s not that the options on the table are easy—many departments are looking at conditions that a 4 percent pay cut won’t begin to solve—but when you control what happens to you and your colleagues/family members, you feel better about it.

This past week, NIST, along with other major fire service organizations, embarked on a study to quantify the effect of firefighting crew sizes and equipment arrival times on fire growth rates and a person’s ability to survive in a structure-related building fire. That is, what do we sacrifice in terms of survivability when we operate with 3 firefighters on an engine as opposed to 4, or 2 as opposed to 3?

The results of the study will be announced later this year, and right now it’s only an assumption that smaller crews are less effective on the fireground. We must wait for the results to come out before we can make such claims.

In this economic climate, such studies are crucial to negotiations like the one my colleague’s department participated in. They can give departments bargaining power to prevent layoffs and further staffing shortages. In short, they can provide a measure of control. And people can make surprisingly unselfish choices when they feel in control of—and responsible for—the fate of others they care about.