Volunteers’ Week

This week is Volunteers’ Week in the UK, a campaign run by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations to recognise and appreciate the work done by nearly 20 million volunteers across the country. The mental health charity that I volunteer for had a social for all its volunteers, and we were given certificates thanking us for the contributions we make. While the work that volunteers do across the UK and their commitment to a cause are admirable, inspiring and worth celebrating, and many organisations do work that is vital for society, I feel the culture around volunteering needs some critical reflection. I am quite divided on the question of volunteer work, as I feel torn between an aversion to the exploitative use of unpaid labour and the radical potential of the kind of altruism, solidarity and collectivism that volunteering entails.

Cutting Costs

The prevalence of unpaid work has come under scrutiny following recent scandals around the exceeding demands of unpaid internships. Volunteer work is no exception, as charities are becoming increasingly reliant on the unpaid labour of volunteers to function. In an article in New Left Project, Ana-Maria Dima interrogates the ways in which organisations reduce the number of staff but increase the number of volunteers in order to reduce their labour costs. Similarly, Sam Reyes gives a scathing account in the New Statesman of how the heritage sector has also become heavily dependent upon the unpaid labour of volunteers. What defines voluntary work is that volunteers have no binding commitment and are free to leave at any time. However, because of pressures to volunteer as a route to employment, and because of people’s own commitments to the organisations for which they volunteer, letting go under unfair conditions is not so easy.

I have volunteered in arts festivals, NGOs, university programmes and charities, and I have had a range of experiences, from excellent organisations that provided the required training and gave me tremendous support, to shambolic arts events for whom I was dispensable, free labour, where I was bullied by one of the guests and given no support by my line manager.

For Whose Gain?

Campaigns to encourage volunteering often advertise the many benefits of doing so as ‘gaining confidence’, ‘add to one’s CV’, ‘learning new skills’, ‘meeting new people’, ‘have new experiences’, ‘developing professional networks’, ‘personal satisfaction’, ‘giving back to the community’, etc. None of these benefits are exclusive to volunteering as opposed to paid work, and there is no reason why one must work unpaid for any of it. There is also the further problem of access, that not everyone can afford to spend hours doing unpaid work because no amount of skills gained or a sense of fulfilment at one’s altruism can pay the rent or buy food.

The 2015 Office of National Statistics report on volunteering found that wealthier people were more likely to volunteer than people from low-income households. Although, interestingly women from low-income households, although less likely to volunteer, tended to spend two-thirds more time doing so when they did. The difference in degree could potentially be because of a difference in motivation between volunteering recreationally or volunteering for other reasons, whether to acquire skills for employment or to work for a cause.

Moreover, there is little evidence that volunteering is a route to employment as a working paper at the Third Sector Research Centre by Angela Ellis Paine, et al. presented a longitudinal study of the British Household Panel Survey and argued that volunteering had ‘no positive effect of volunteering on young people’s (16-25 year olds) employment, no matter how much they did’ and ‘among 26-44 year olds, volunteering had very little effect — either positive or negative — on the chances of moving into employment’ (11). Paine, et al. suggest that while volunteering adds skills and qualifications to the supply side, it ‘does little to address any limits within the demand side of the labour market any gains are ineffective’ (17).

What Do We Value?

Many charities and volunteer organisations do work which is vital to society, like caring for the elderly, working with the fire and rescue service, or even responding to a civil emergency like the burning down of Grenfell Towers. They are often filling the gaps in the services the state is unable to provide. This is certainly my experience of volunteering with a mental health charity, as increasingly these organisations provide services like counselling or psychotherapy when the National Health Service is stretched beyond its capacity.

However, that this kind work that is vital to society goes unpaid provokes serious questions of what kind of work we value in society, and what kind of work is adequately compensated. Much of the critique of unpaid work draws from feminist literature that interrogates the ways in which women’s unpaid labour is rendered invisible within national accounting figures, especially in the context of domestic or caring work1. Beth Anne Shelton briefly expands the discussion of this kind of work to include volunteering in her chapter in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender.

While the politics of unpaid work that Marilyn Waring and Beth Shelton interrogate are pertinent, unpaid domestic work is a very specific kind of labour entangled within a politics of gender and capitalism that is different from volunteering. But it is worth asking, in a similar vein, why is it that some of the vital kinds of work — for example going around the city during a snow storm to provide shelter, food and support to homeless people, or supporting local residents of Grenfell in dealing with the trauma of having their homes burnt down — are not paid. This is an obvious failure in our society and a terrible warping of our values if work that is literally saving people’s lives is not worth compensation.

Double-Edged

The reason people come together and give their time and effort to volunteer is out of solidarity and collectivism, and this can be quite powerful. In a society dominated by a neo-liberal logic of individualism and profit, these forms of solidarity offer a radical corrective to the dominant modes of labour and compensation around which a capitalist economy is structured. However, the recent trends in the volunteering sector — especially the increased professionalisation of volunteering — indicates a more worrying trend of this altruism being co-opted within a capitalist economy as ways of externalising costs. Moreover, most of the campaigns that promote volunteering do so in a language that is transactional and business-like: ‘giving something back’ to the community and ‘getting skills/experience/etc. in return’.

If we are celebrating the work volunteers do, and if we truly value the contributions millions of people make to our society without getting paid, then we must think of this not in terms of these kinds of transactions, but as a much bigger picture, a corrective to a society motivated by individuals and profit, one where all kinds of labour is valued and people come together in collective solidarity. Moreover, this can only be sustained by a radical alternative to the way in which labour is valued and compensated today, otherwise we risk lapsing back into closed loop where these kinds of voluntary contributions are co-opted and exploited.

Notes:

1 Most prominently in Marilyn Waring’s 1988 work If Women Counted: a New Feminist Economics.