Wrong! We, the tax payers, are paying them to stay in the office and push papers, not to be on the habitat job site pulling electrical wiring.
The word "volunteer" is a noun, from French, volontaire and Latin, voluntārius voluntary. Here's a few definitions:
*Military. A person who enters the service voluntarily rather than through conscription or draft, esp. for special or temporary service rather than as a member of the regular or permanent army.
There's a time-tested army saying: Never volunteer; it usually means doing an extremely hazardous or dirty job.
*Law. (a) A person whose actions are not founded on any legal obligation so to act.
That's good; a loophole we can wiggle through because we made a really bad deal.
*Law. (b) A person who intrudes into a matter that does not concern him or her.
Ah, the buttinsky principle.
*An inhabitant of Tennessee used as a nickname.
At least that's logical; Tennessee is known as the Volunteer State. Maybe we should send our "volunteering" city workers there, but they really have to obey the letter of the definition.
*Adjective. Of, or being a volunteer: a volunteer fireman.
Okay, guys. Come back from Tennessee. We need all the volunteer firemen we can get for Red Flag (high fire danger warnings because of high winds and low humidity) days.
*Agriculture. Growing without being seeded, planted, or cultivated by a person.
A weed. Or as I like to call them, uninvited guests.
*To give, bestow, or perform voluntarily.
All those sub-definitions and not one mention of getting paid to volunteer. The closest it comes is in the reverse, to voluntarily donate money to charity, that is unless your city-paid boss is twisting your arm to sign up to "voluntarily" give to United Way or the March of Dimes, both of which are city-encouraged acts of "volunteerism."
If you fall into the arm-twisted category, as I might be, because I don't want to give either of those charities a penny of my money; I have my own favorite charities. You haven't volunteered to have a dollar a week taken out of you paycheck, you've been bulldozed into doing it.
That brings us back to volunteering to build houses, because lots have to be bulldozed and leveled before they can be built upon.
The city doesn't have a clear policy on employees volunteering their services for charitable work, nor do they have any way of keeping track of which employees actually volunteered for the Habitat for Humanity project, how many hours they worked, or if they even showed up to work, opting instead to go to a movie or spend the day in bed.
All this is not to say that volunteering can't pay off. Just ask me.
For years I donated my services to a Womens American ORT chapter, writing all the press releases and newsletters. That "paid off." It led to a "paying" job as a reporter with a local weekly newspaper.
If I could afford it, which I can't because the City Council keeps illegally raising taxes by calling them "fees," and then either wasting the money or not spending it on what is was dedicated to, I'd race to the nearest book store and buy each one of them an unabridged Oxford English dictionary along with a Roget's Thesaurus.
