AIBU to think these expectations of a charity shop manager are unfair?

This may be illegal.
https://www.gov.uk/rest-breaks-work
ACAS can offer advice

You want to volunteer for a charity @SorcererGaheris , which is admirable.

So why not do it for a charity you actually respect? Evidently you don’t at all respect this one

In my experience charities can be mercenary and treat people badly. You are a volunteer you shouldn’t feel guilty not to want to go in on a Sunday. Your manager needs to find a new job if they treat her so badly.

True.

Can you imagine the sex crimes scandals if oxfam paired with the church of England or catholic church...? It would be never ending...

All the donations and income would go on lawyers to pay for more cover ups...

Indeed today, the best job in any charity is not CEO, it's the lawyers representing the board and company who can name their price when it hits the fan. Then, overtime is paid!!! (and money is 'found' by the CEO.. 😬

A new pool of volunteers.
Back up people who can be called if need be who already help ?
The manager needs to delegate the part timer to work sundays or alternate them

I think you've misunderstood @ilovemybluesharpie's paragraph saying "The Charity is breaking NMW laws if they are not paying her for the hours that she works if she is not getting enough TOIL".

It isn't about a single Sunday. It's about the average across whole year (especially if taking annual leave and TOIL is difficult). If across the year the wage divided by hours is less than minimum wage, they could get in trouble with HMRC.

Btw do you want to help or advise her, or only discuss it here? Because she clearly has been abandoned and it sounds like she's feeling quite lost, and could do with some advice. Please tell her to call ACAS.

All of the information is in the public domain. Read for yourself…
https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/annual-report

I'm sure if you went on the charity commission website, or the BHF website, then you could pore through the accounts to your heart's content.

People regularly come out with stuff about how only 1p in the pound actually goes to the cause and 99p in "fat cat salaries" but if they actually bothered to look into the detail, they'd see that's not true.

It depends on the charity shop and the volunteers. I used to volunteer for Oxfam, stopped about 3 years ago. The manager when I started was very good and totally believed in empowering volunteers. There were some volunteers who had been there for 10 years or more, and many of us were allowed to open up the shop, lock up at night, do the cashing up, process refunds and the other "manager" parts of the job. The manager knew who was able and who wasn't. It meant that when she was off on annual leave (she did not have a deputy at that point) she knew the shop would keep running. We had an area manager on call, a list of all the other local shops and their numbers on the noticeboard in the office, and store support at head office on the other end of the phone. Many of the volunteers were just as able, experienced and intelligent as the paid manager, they were just volunteering.

When I volunteered for Save The Children, there was no paid member of staff at all. There were 2 or 3 lead volunteers who would do things like the banking, H&S training for new volunteers and volunteer recruitment, but it was a very democratic set up and again, most of the volunteers were very able and smart, just not in paid full-time work for whatever reason. Shops can run very well without a paid member of staff. Also agree with what @SorcererGaheris says about wages, they are very low, Oxfam and Save the Children don't even offer things like staff discount which is standard in retail. And a lot more responsibility.

Regional managers - in Oxfam at least - are very hot on targets, performance against same week last year, year to date, by category. If you're in a store where as a manager you are struggling to hit target of course you're going to feel the pressure to open on a Sunday because that's more trading hours. All the charity shops round here (except the Salvation Army) are open on Sunday. Also recognise the issue with not being able to take TOIL.

"Research" is very vague. How much of that goes to the senior management in "research" and how much to the workers? How much good is done as a result of this "research".

72p of every £ at BHF goes towards research. I have volunteered with them for six years and don’t feel taken advantage of.
https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/where-your-money-goes

I think charity shops have passed their sell by date. People are well aware that hardly any of the money they make actually goes to needy people, they charge high prices for the donated goods they sell, they take advantage of their volunteers and low-paid staff, , while the Greedy Executives rake it in. And that's not even mentioning all the sex crimes.

I'm surprised volunteers are allowed to be there without paid staff. Where I volunteer has decided to open on Sundays but the manager or the deputy has to be there. The manager still only works five days though. On most Sundays she's on her own so has asked for volunteers to go in for an hour so she can have a lunch break.
The well being of the staff seems to be bottom of the list for the company/ charity.

Definitely happening to my friend (also near retirement age so doesn’t want to rock the boat)

I think she is making some effort to try to recruit an additional volunteer or two for Sundays, but in my experience, that's a tough day to get people to agree to volunteer on.

So volunteers definitely are her responsibility? To be honest, she just doesn't sound very good at her job. I get there may also be some corporate issues that make her job harder than it could be but from things you've posted about her in the past, she does really poorly at the volunteer aspect and that's a critical part of running a shop that relies on volunteers properly.

The equality act does not give you a right to a particular day off for religious reasons if it means genuine operational difficulties for the workplace. A workplace would need to try to accommodate the request, but if it is not possible without being detrimental to the business (like having to close sometimes) it does not have to.

However, retail workers have a right to refuse Sunday working without needing a reason unless they've been hired on a Sunday only contract. So niether she nor the deputy manager could be "forced".

But the manager's problem seems to be that she is responsible for ensuring Sunday coverage. She's working Sundays because she's failing to do that, not because she's contracted to. So if she opts out she still has the issue of needing to ensure the store is open.

Well there you are then - Bingo.

Religion is a protected characteristic and she goes to church. By law, they cannot force her to work on Sundays. That's all she needs to tell them.

Have you posted about this shitshow before? It sounds familiar

Can she get another manager from another shop to cover?
Alternate Sundays with the deputy manager? Get another volunteer for Sundays?
Ask the area manager to cover?
Close the shop regardless of being told off? Take TOIL on a weekday to make up for the Sunday?
Bring a grievance against her employer? Make a working time regulations or minimum wage complaint to the LA if she's forced to work too much or for under minimum wage?
Lots of options if the current setup no longer works for the organisation who now want them to stay open on a Sunday.

It does sound like there may be a breach of employment regulations - with statutory rest breaks or potentially minimum wage, but also like she may not be telling her employer how she's covering everything because then she'd be worried about being fired for capability since it sounds like it's her job to manage resources to ensure coverage, not actually to do it herself and that's what she's failing to manage. So I don't think the responsibilities are necessarily that unreasonable, depending on how much authority the manager has over the resources.

It sounds like there is a need for better volunteer management - the shop obviously doesn't have enough volunteers who are committed enough. Better volunteer management should mean there aren't days when the needed number of volunteers aren't there. so if that's part of her remit and not something that head office manage, then it seems likely it's less that the expectations are too much and more that she just isn't up to the job. The manager does sound pretty poor at volunteer engagement from this and your other threads (moaning to your volunteers about your job is pretty high up there on how not to manage volunteers).

Also it seems poor to have 1.5 fte and not have them cover every day of the week between them. There may be a reason for this that is the manager's responsibility, like the manager agreeing to a change to days to please either herself or the deputy manager when it would have been more appropriate to insist on Sunday being a contracted day. Or it may be down to the employer advertising jobs this way so they can claim they don't insist on Sunday working or something. Hard to know.

But, you have previously posted about the shop not actually being safe to work in and that affecting volunteer engagement, and if that's what's really driving this and the manager doesn't have influence over the refuse collection/donations accepted, then that's very unreasonable of the employers.

I used to shop at charity shops a lot, but the clothes aren't good any more, and I'd not want to be paying the outrageous salaries of the fat cats at the top whose only skills are marketing and ripping of the people further down the hierarchy.

I'm not at all surprised that those giving their time are horribly treated. Look at what they do to the apparent recipients (oxfam, Save the Children, MSF, I'm looking at you).