Saturday, September 13, 2008

People should never financially benefit from disasters

After recent runaway fires caused much destruction all over the country, I was reminded of an overheard conversation between two men my age.

They were reminiscing about the old days in Milnerton, Cape. One of them worked, as a volunteer, for the first fire brigade in Milnerton. He said that they got paid, when the need arose for them to be called out.

Whenever they were short of money, they used to light a bush fire. If they found that they were still short of cash after extinguishing that fire, they used to light another.

The moral of the story is: Never create an employment opportunity where people’s wages depend on the maintenance of emergency situations. Fire fighters, for instance, should be paid whether here is a fire to fight or not. Volunteers are just that - voluntary service providers - not supplementary-income earners.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, thought I would pop over and let you know of the latest news. Iblog is now in the hands of ITWeb and not RSAWeb. The transition went smoothly although they still have to do picture uploads. iblog has not crashed and so far it is fresh, fast and efficient. I am back there now and very excited that Mark has finally made the change to a new server.
Please come back.

Rosa said...

I am between the "boom en die bas"

My blog rhythm is completely broken. White_granny i-blog is still giving problems.

Granny