RDU firing out-of-shape public safety personnel
Saturday, 10 April, 2010 — fitness
A number of both police and fire & rescue personnel at Raleigh-Durham International Airport have been terminated for not meeting physical fitness test standards.
Emergency response agencies all have similar standards for recruits - but they have different ideas about keeping workers in shape.
Like other employers trying to curb health costs, RDU has stepped up its emphasis on employee wellness. Fitness testing for police, fire and rescue workers started in 1996. Those employees were told in 2007 that merit raises would be postponed for those who could not meet an evolving standard.
In 2008, they were told they could be fired. That year, 11 police employees and 10 fire-rescue workers failed the test several times. [Lt. Billie C.] Rose was one of them, and she says the pressure was intense.
Rose doesn’t sound happy to be let go:
It’s not fair to measure a person’s overall performance by just one or two sections of a physical fitness test.
… I’ve been an excellent employee. I have the evaluations to show it.
Except, every job has key criteria and employers can say, “this is essential.” A multi-year warning seems quite ample to get compliant, particularly in a public safety situation where the fitness of the responder can be a significant factor in their ability to act successfully. Further, as the article states, RDU kept the criteria lenient. I’d find the standard challenging right now, but if my job depended on it, I’d get there.
I can see this happening elsewhere, in the not-too-distant future.
Physical fitness is only tangentially related for most white-collar work, but I can definitely see companies being more vocal in encouraging employees to get into shape to keep company-borne health-care costs down. Currently, there’s mild encouragement to improve health and bring issues like obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes under control. I can see companies setting fitness targets (body fat percentage, cholesterol balance, blood pressure, run time) in order to stay in a particular cost tier. Out-of-bounds? Your share of the premium is higher.