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Permalink Reply by Malin on June 5, 2008 at 6:17pm

Hello! I'm from Finland, I don't know how you are working. We used to be a club, and our club had a contract with our town. The town paid us for the job we did. In that contract it said what we were supposed to do how many people who had to be on watch and how fast the first unit had to be on place and stuff like that... That worked ok for us. The minuses with that was that the contract with the city could be ended once a year, but in the club you could quit whenever you wanted. If many quitted on the same time, there were a lot of work for the others, because the club still had to see to that there were always 3 people on watch.
Then the state rearranged the fire districts and made them big, and now we all are employees of the fire district. We get paid when we are on watch and when we are out on a job. 2 people at the time are on watch, they have to be at the firehouse in 3-5 minutes. The first car goes out before 5 minutes.
Both systems are ok I think. Financyally the first system worked better for us, it was a smaller community, and it was easier to get people to understand that we also need to get paid. It was harder to get new cars and gear.
The new system makes it easier to get cars and gear, but it's very hard to get a pay raise.
I don't know if this helped you at all, but if you have time, please tell me how you work. It's always nice to see how things are done in another country.