Not many can resist an offer of money for nothing

AFTER writing about some of the incredibly bad service customers receive from certain businesses, I received an interesting but rather distressing letter from Michael Bagraim, who writes a regular column about labour laws in this newspaper and has been a labour lawyer for 35 years.

Many lazy employees, he tells me, make quite a good living out of being lazy.

Even when they are dismissed for having an incredibly negative attitude and refusing to get off their lazy butts and do some work they run to the CCMA and demand damages for unfair dismissal.

Many small businesses do not have the time or resources to defend these cases, so they simply pay the employee for a few months to make the whole thing go away.

Invariably the story repeats itself and the same employee appears in the labour court a few months later, again claiming for “unfair dismissal”. One of the unfortunate side effects of this sort of thing is that many people who are genuinely willing to work hard for a living are denied the opportunity of doing so because employers are afraid to be caught out again.

What is it about human nature that makes people willing to go to great lengths to avoid work? I often hear about very complicated scams that people have set up to extract a few rand from victims’ bank accounts.

I always think that if the con artists had used all that ingenuity and cunning in another direction they might actually have done some good. I think it’s the same in sport.

Once sport became a high-paying profession, athletes started thinking of short-cuts to earn the money.

It is now 30 years since the first British athlete, pole vaulter Jeff Gutteridge, received a lifetime ban for testing positive for steroids.

That doesn’t seem to have deterred others from using performance-enhancing drugs.

All it’s done is to establish a whole new industry of medical scammers trying to find new ways of fooling the drug tests.

We’re all after the easy money. I guess I receive a fake proposition on my computer about once a week on average.

Some advise me that there’s an unclaimed sum of money due for collection, some offer me shares in stolen government funds and others tell me I have won the grand prize in a competition I do not remember entering.

I have a well-worn “delete” button on my computer. But I suppose there must be a significant number of suckers who fall for these tricks, otherwise the scammers wouldn’t keep doing them.

Not many people, it seems, can resist an offer of money for nothing.

Last Laugh

ACCOUNTANTS are known for being wary of accepting anything as fact until it has been proved. Two accountants were travelling by train together when the one looked out of the window and said: “Look, John, there’s a flock of sheep out there and they have just been shorn.”

“Well, yes,” said John, “on this side anyway.”