We don't want to bring the city to its knees financially. We want to do our jobs safely.

The award is somewhat problematic for us because we are not greedy for money. For us, this has been a matter of following the contract.

For us, this is about how many people we send to an incident. It's about keeping both the firefighters and the public safe.

Our discussions are more meaningful than they have been in a long time and we hope to iron all this out in the next few weeks.

Most of the positions being outsourced are at the bottom of the totem pole, such as call-center jobs, but those jobs, in turn, lend themselves to automation, which means that the people doing them could themselves be replaced.

We have a number of jobs here in the Puget sound area -- well over 1,000 technical jobs.