Volunteers or Employees?

I am astonished that volunteers can be 'required' to do set hours, take fixed breaks etc! Surely the whole point of doing a job voluntarily is that you choose when you can turn up? If the person in charge is not paying you, they have no right to tell you how to organise your time.
I volunteer at the local primary school, hearing children read and giving one-to-one support to boost slow readers' progress. I liaise with their class teacher over a suitable time slot, but if I can't do it one week I just tell them I won't be available! They are very grateful and I get a lovely card from the pupils and teachers thanking me at the end of the year, in addition to the joy of watching the children blossom.

Moocow Thank you for that I sometimes wonder if it was just me !!

pinkjj27 you are not alone in your experience and not alone within that particular charity if it is the one I am thinking og. Not my own experience of them but a friend, who now feels exactly as you do. Of course her experience has it has reflected where those of us who know about it choose to go.

I have three volunteer positions well its two now, the two I do now are about supporting people. One where I support young people who have been abused and the other I work in a hospice. I feel like \I am putting something back and the experiences I have had and what I went through can be used to help others. I also feel by supporting people with cancer means my husbands death wasn't meaningless, ( if you know what I mean,) I feel valued and I do only what I feel able to. Three years ago I worked in a charity shop for a famous charity beginning with a B that supports children. Frankly for the three years I worked for them I was treated like dirt.I also work full time in my paid role, so I used to go in weekends and summer holidays and half terms, But I was always being asked to do more take a day off my paid work take a holiday or go sick they were always on at me to do to do more they used a lot of pressure to make me feel guilty. The paid employers used to go off for coffee and a fag leave me to run the shop. Nasty jobs were stored up for me they would laugh and say h we have a lovely little job for you that no one else will do!! They would go off shopping. and leave me In charge It was a standard joke that when I was in they could have a day off. ( I have management skills) It was clicky and they would have staff outings for the paid staff only. There was a lot of bullying and bitchiness which I some times was in the line for but it was mostly aimed at anyone different such as gay or ethnic diversity, There seem to be little charity and most people that worked there were working there to find bargains or people on community service who had no choice. When my husband got ill with cancer and I wanted to change my days the manageress said I was selfish letting the team down and I should pick my proprieties so I did I choose my husband and left. While I was working there I did alert head office to the goings on but they just paid lip service to it and said as people were volunteers they had no rights and were free to leave !! There they had a big staff meeting about why they had no volunteers and ideas about attracting them and keeping them I contributed by saying perhaps don't bully them and I was promptly told this wasn't helpful. !!! My husband died but I would never go back and to this day I am still hurt by it. They used me and I was never valued I wont donate to that charity anymore.

As I said, sad that the librarians are no longer employed but our village library is so well used that it would be cutting off our own noses to let it close. I'm no longer involved but it is a constant battle to raise the funds to keep it open.

Witness Service was vital and sitting around chatting was a huge part of our role. I was a natural.

I still do that helping deliver Carer's courses for the Alzheimer's Society.

I campaign for our local library and work to prevent it closing, but I would not work as a volunteer because that would be replacing a paid employee. The local authority needed to make drastic savings because they had hugely overspent (millions) replacing the central library, and proposed to pay for it by closing all the branch libraries.

I volunteer for a local charity that is working to bring a Grade Two listed building that was formerly a Working Man's Institute back into use by the community. There is only one person who is salaried and that is the Project Officer. Without the volunteers it just wouldn't be happening. I think it is the bigger charities who see volunteers as 'money saving' because they don't have to pay them - smaller charities like the animal rescue groups and the charity I work with desperately need volunteers because they are operating on a tiny budget to begin with. I also have an issue with just how much the Director(s) of the bigger charities get paid - do they really need this? There must be equally good and capable people who have retired who could do the job for much less (if not for free as a volunteer themselves)

Citizens Advice are mainly staffed by skilled volunteers we do not receive Government funding and are reliant on donations and grants to operate. If we did not have people willing to take on these skilled roles unpaid then we would not be able to operate! In many towns we are the only source of free legal information available to people and we assist many of the most vulnerable and impoverished in our communities. It’s all very well saying these jobs should be for paid staff but in the case of charities where will the money come from!

Big international charities like Oxfam are more than happy to use volunteers so they can continue to pay their directors £250,000 a year salary. I wouldn't give them a second of my time or a penny of my money. I only support small local charities so I know where the money is going.

I try to make volunteers aware of how sad but grateful for the time they give in places like our library. Surely witness service volunteering must be vital to those who need it though kittylester?

When our village Library was threatened with closure we set up a management committee and took it on. The library is completely volunteer run but would have closed otherwise and the staff moved or made redundant. I would rather have a volunteer run library than no library at all.

I used to volunteer for the Witness Service and our job was to support victims and witnesses in trials. We received good training but spent our days, mostly, sitting chatting - not cost effective for a paid member of staff.

The museum I help at used to have 2 full time professionals and assistant coverage the week. Now they have about 1 and a half staff, so in a way volunteers are covering what used to be paid work. As a volunteer however, I can go home at the end of an activity or shift, I can just sign up for once in a month if I want to, and, whilst being a highly reliable person, I can opt out if something else comes up, subject to giving due notice. I wouldn't regard it as volunteering if I was required to do a certain number of hours a week, though I notice other volunteers often put in a lot of hours or take charge of the whole museum as key holders. Each type of volunteer can be useful, for example I have an education role that the key holders don't, and am useful during the sessions I do pick and choose from. Sometimes it would perhaps be helpful of more volunteers said no to demands, rather than be a martyr to them, and then more onus would be on the organisation to cover more effectively,

Library cuts have meant that most libraries are only able to stay open because of the goodwill of the volunteers. My local library has a dedicated team of volunteers who each take it in turns to do 2 hours shelving a day, without them the service simply could not continue to operate as the staffing is at a minimum - where there once was a team of 4 now there is just the one, who can often be spotted running from one side of the library to the other to answer the phone, helping people on computers and another 101 things she is expected to do alone now as the powers that be make the savings.

I've done vounteering for many years only to find recently they have started to employ a small team to supplement the work I and others have been doing as they realise it's so vital. Needless to say we are all backing away now. Why they couldn't be upfront with us I don't know. Ever since the London Olympics I've longed for one of those useless surveys to be carried out on the hours of volunteering that are being undertaken, which areas, and how much it is helping to keep things going, etc. You know the kind of survey I mean, the ones that tell you what you already know!

I have done voluntary work for a Charity and when I saw the "job" specification, I couldn't believe how much they wanted from their volunteers. They also wanted someone who had the same health condition the Charity was highlighting which, when you consider how debilitating the condition is, seems crazy. Needless to say, volunteers come, struggle for a bit and then move on. Each one needs training and it seems an incredible waste of resources to work this way.

My sister volunteers at a charity shop. They are treated as employees - Rotas, set hours, sales targets etc. Some of the older ladies don't hit their targets or want to drop their hours a bit as they get older so the charity invites them to leave in favour of the words they used were " younger, dynamic more committed resources". I think the ladies should take them to a tribunal for a pension if they are going to pension them off... cheeky organisations... it's all just become big business! I avoid charities like the plague now, they have got greedy wanting everything for nothing. I didn't mind helping charities out but even for a good cause profiteering is wrong.

Spot on GrumpyoldBat. Beat me to it. However there seems little heart to pursue tribunals where volunteers are used as employees.

That's very interesting, Grumpyoldbat. The volunteers and those on bank at the hospice all do the same job, with the same rules and so on, but only the staff have any holiday pay, sick pay or rights. Definitely a three tier system.

I was a Chartered Librarian and worked for many years in public libraries. When the local authority got rid of all their qualified librarians, due to savage budget cuts, they were replaced by customer care assistants and many volunteers!

I too would refuse in this situation, it’s exploitation of the kind nature of volunteers.

When I retired I went to talk to the local Citizens' Advice Bureau to offer a few hours a week. I was offered a job similar to the one that I had just retired from. I would have been working for at least fifteen hours a week, and in addition for some evenings taking minutes at meetings that 'could last for three hours', and then typing the notes. I don't do shorthand and am not a professional typist. Can you imagine just how much that voluntary job would have taken from my week? Probably more than my previous paid employment!

Organisations need to be careful when using volunteers. One of the core principles if volunteering is that volunteers should not replace paid staff. Also, if an organisation treats it's volunteers like staff (insisting on certain hours, fixed breaks, all the stuff that looks like an employment contract) they can find themselves in a tribunal and having to back-pay wages and NI contributions because they treated the volunteer as an employee, making that volunteer entitled to minimum wage, NI contributions and paid holiday.

I recently left a role as entertainment manager at a sheltered housing complex, when I found out that residents were charged £20 per week each for my voluntary services.

The housing association, were taking ample money to employ someone and should do so. No point worrying about the economy and facilitating unemployment.

Some charity shops treat their staff badly, and when I left a voluntary placement at one, I wrote to the head office and told them, I would not want to be on my death bed knowing that people had been exploited to give me a few, rather pointless luxuries. The salaries those at the top pay themselves are obscene and our CEO went to jail for fraud.

I used to work for the local hospice, as a therapist. Originally I approached them, wanting a paid job, but there was already someone there doing it voluntarily. So I joined them. After a few months I left, having realised that this wasn't leading to anything. But I did love working on the wards, so a few years later I went back, again in a voluntary capacity. After a while I was put "on bank", i.e. called on as and when needed, and paid. This could be one day a week but was usually three. Very similar to zero hours contracts. Earlier this year I was told there was no more money left in the budget, thank you and goodbye. Doctors were prescribing Reiki and it was valued by the patients and nursing staff.
I always thought there were two types of volunteers - the ones who want to give something back to the community and would look after the flowers, for instance, and those who have a skill which I think should be paid for.
I was approached by another hospice but after a couple of interviews learned that the matron insisted on all therapists volunteering for an unspecified length of time before being paid. Those volunteers were also expected to fork out for membership of two organisations (a couple of hundred pounds) and buy their own uniform.
I decided against it.

£80 a day wow wish I git paid that as nursery nurse!