When public safety is threatened, strikes should be banned

The Fire Brigade’s Union (FBU) have called for strike action in London during the busiest firefighting night of the year: Bonfire Night.  Attempts to renegotiate work patterns (already changed in several fire brigades but unchanged in London for thirty years) have been hysterically termed ‘sacking’ all London firefighters by the union.  Rather like the threatened British Airways strike during Christmas 2009, this is a clear attempt by a trade union to use its monopoly power to force an employer into accepting its terms by inflicting maximum possible damage on the general public.
 
This is clearly worse than a normal strike, however.  If, say, all Asda employees went on strike, we could shop at Tesco or another supermarket. In the case of British Airways, many people were concerned that they could not book alternative tickets as BA is the sole carrier on certain routes. However, both of these are essentially forms of inconvenience and very unlikely to be life-threatening, which is clearly not the case for firefighters.