Laura Kavanagh, the city’s first woman fire commissioner, faced a mutiny by several male staff just months into her administration
Sitting in her office in Brooklyn, wearing a flame-red jacket and black pants, Kavanagh says that growing up in a “large and complicated” clan and running a department with relatives cascading through the ranks make the turmoil she faces feel like a family feud, in a family with a life-or-death mission.
Laura Kavanagh has an Irish-Italian background, mirroring her department’s traditional DNA. Photograph: Sasha Arutyunova/The New York Times The drama began on February 3rd, when Kavanagh delegated to her chief of staff the demotion of three three-star staff chiefs working at headquarters – Michael Gala, Fred Schaaf and Joseph Jardin – while she was in a meeting the rest of her leadership team. The three men, in their early 60s – they were in the group of 27 staff chiefs at headquarters – are deputy chiefs now, back in the field.
Days after the demotions, John Hodgens, the five-star chief of department and its highest-ranking uniformed official, and John Esposito, the chief of fire operations, asked to be demoted to civil service ranks. I came here to do the right thing by the department and it’s going to require some hard decisions and some pushingMeanwhile, seven staff chiefs have joined Hodgens and Esposito in solidarity, asking to be demoted. Kavanagh, trying to steady the ship, has not approved any of the requests.
Some outside the top ranks have little patience for the chiefs’ complaints. “A soap opera in a crystal palace,” an Emergency Medical Services union official calls the controversy. “Chiefs sucking their thumbs and stamping their feet,” a firefighter says. “I came here to do the right thing by the department and it’s going to require some hard decisions and some pushing,” she says. “It will be in the rear-view mirror someday.”
Working in a hypermasculine culture, Laura Kavanagh wants to get rid of the toxic element that leads to bullying and cruelty. Photograph: Sasha Arutyunova/New York Times Curiously, given the opposition she has faced in her five months on the job, her thesis for her master’s of public administration at Columbia, titled The Poisoned Water-Cooler: Workplace Gossip as a Lever of Power, examined the role of gossip and rumour in organisations that are clinging to the status quo and the harmful effect that has on women leaders.
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