... to think the gov can eff off if they think I'm going to do voluntary work?

[woollyideas]

I'm really fed up with reading about this hypothetical army of volunteers who will run our libraries, patrol school crossings etc., etc. as part of the old Big Society thingmy. AIBU to think that if I was to be made redundant due to government cuts, I would prefer to lie in bed a bit later than usual, write, paint, read, bake cakes, stick two fingers up to the Condems, etc., after 30-odd years of working? Or do you think I should just pop along and be an unpaid slave happily work for nothing in a local school or something worthy?

What would you do?

When I see Dave and Gideon step up to the plate and do their weekly stint as volunteer bin men, or volunteer personal carers in a home for the elderly (grab the chance now guys, before they are all closed ) , then I will believe that they believe in it. Until then I will continue to believe that they are pursuing a political agenda to impose market forces on what should be needs-driven services, using the deficit as a cover.

I reaaly really wish it would collapse and bury the whole stinking pile.(of condems)

But I fear it is undernmining the very fabric of democracy itself, and I fear that that is not widely appreciated.For eg, your local council currently runs social services/ library/leisure centre/ insert service of choice here. If you do not like how they run it you can ultimately VOTE THEM OUT on that basis. If your services are being run by do-gooder and volunteers, andyou do not like what they do, you CANNOT vote them out. It is really really scary.

Museums & Libraries need to be run by Professionals. As a paid employee you have a clearly understood contract to behave in a fair, ethic way. During work hours you put aside your own passions and present a balanced viewpoint taking into consideration the whole of society.

With my experience/qualifications I could end up running your volunteer libraries and museums then see what happens.

I've only got daughters so that means no Ben 10, Captain Underpants and dinosaur books. Although your daughter may love fairy books, I don't so you can forget that. I don't need large print or 'how to look after your horse' books.

As for the museums, if I'm not being paid, I'm running it my way, following my heart. So once my kids are grown up, they'll be no toddler sessions. I'm not keen on modern art, I like vintage cleaning equipment so I'm happy to sell off the Old Station Clock to raise funds to buy more vacum cleaners.

You can see this approach in lots of museums who relied on volunteers in the past. Natiol Trust has only just woken up to the fact that people like to hear belowstairs tales, the volunteers from 1930 to today just liked poking round the posh side of the houses rather then sitting with some maid of all work listening to tales of hard work. So decades of oral history went unrecorded. Industrial museums have always relied on men to keep the steam trains running, play in the workshop and again terrible displays, the greater social context ignored, just a closed shop.

As you can see although volunteering on the surface appears to be unselfish and for the community without the professional backbone that a living wage provides it's all about 'me'.

Blackbag you are so spot on.

In my experience (managing 200+ volunteers), even the WILLING volunteers can be a bit flaky as regards getting the job done properly, on time, reliably etc. Obviously not all of them, but many people put their work, families, social life and holidays before their volunteering commitments. Adding an army of uninterested, unwilling people is only going to make this worse.

It takes a lot of time and effort to train someone to be a volunteer, even in basic roles. There is a fair amount of administration involved in having them. If there are going to be more volunteers then there will need to be more paid staff managing them, and if there are going to be more paid staff then why not just pay people to do the fecking job in the first place?

Thankyou Yellowvan, trying to remove a Misguided volunteer/do-gooder in a museum is a nightmare, they poison the whole set up for other volunteers and there is very little you can do to move them on. They are not acoountable, there are no appraisals, retraining, redundancies, et.c None of the policies that paid work environments have evolved to manage our many bizarre personality traits apply.

Blackbag that is exactly right. I have vowed never to work in a mainly volunteer run museum again. Many of them are a waste of public money.

How can anyone object to the basic principle of helping out on a voluntary basis? I think the idea is basically a good one, albeit flawed. Why do people feel so aggrieved at the suggestion that they might try to help society out a bit? Inevitably at a time when there have to be enormous cuts to services, everyone does need to do their bit to reduce their own costs; why is it so unacceptable to suggest that they might try to do a bit more?

I work full time. I also help as much as I can with the PTA, and am a school governor. This is because I want to help our local school as much as I can, and these are things that I can fit around work and family. No-one is asking that any individual stop working and replace it with voluntary work, just that people try to gradually change the prevailing selfish, me-first attitude so beautifully illustrated by the OP of "why should I?". There may not be anything in it for you; that's the point - helping someone else, showing a bit of 'community spirit', IF YOU CAN.

Iwant- Read the thread. It's about making currently paid roles unpaid. It's about workfare (working for benefits), unpaid female labour and many other things. nothing wrong with being on your PTA. Good for you.

Trying to manage museums with shrinking/ non exsistent budgets along with the volunteer aspect has I'm afraid put me off the whole sector - which I'm actually gutted about since I fought so hard to get there in the first place and still feel very passionate about.

Museums have had to run a 'Big Society' situation for a considerable number of years. David needs to have a few 'off the record' chats with professionals in this field in order to find out what really happens.

my theory about voluntary/professional museums is that museums that are all run by volunteers have their place and can in fact be fantastic in a quirky, partial, unprofessional way, but using high proportions of volunteers in a museum managed and funded by the state is an awkward dynamic which is in the end not satisfying for either side.

If you're a big museum with a variety of very specific roles and a skilled, trained labour force (eg big museums in the US with volunteer docent programmes) you CAN expect ethical behaviour and get volunteers to sign contracts but volunteers are only ever going to make up a small proportion of the labour force in those museums. A multidisciplinary local authority museum that 20 years ago had half a dozen curators and now has 3 plus a whole bunch of retired people volunteering can't sack 2 of the remaining curators and replace them with volunteers....

IWant, I think you've missed the point. They are not asking you to stop working and volunteer, they are slashing public services, forcing through masses of redundancies through cuts and then making people work for benefits. If you really can't see the connection, I'd be very surprised. No one is being asked, they are being 'forced'. The use of the word 'voluntary' in any capacity related to these plans is very wrong indeed.

There is nothing at all voluntary about Dave's volunteering plan. He may as well say "do it or don't eat", because that's exactly what it amounts to. And of course people will have to do it if these heinous plans go through, and therefore the ConDems will be able to claim their plan was a good one, when it no realm will it actually be so. It will be people doing compulsory 'volunteering' to enable the ConDems to make others redundant.

Very, very dangerous that some people aren't seeing through this.

(by 'museums that are all run by volunteers' I mean individual museums that are 100% volunteer run, not 100% of museums being volunteer-run, obviously.)

I dont understand why they are sacking people and then asking volunteers to do those jobs for free, surely those paid people would have spent their cash and helped boost the economy?

Im sure when i received hb whilst at uni there was a point on my claiming that if i was to volunteer that i would lose the hb as if i was able/had time to volunteer why couldnt i find paid employment and pay my own rent-does anyone know if this is valid now? obviously if there is no work about not much you can do

Iwantanotherbaby
How very dare you say this about me:
...just that people try to gradually change the prevailing selfish, me-first attitude so beautifully illustrated by the OP of "why should I?"

I'll have you know I do my fair share of volunteering (a) because I want to support a particular charity (b) at times that suit me/my commitments/take account of childcare needs etc. Oh yes, and I work. So you can just feck off saying I have selfish, me-first attitude and read the thread with your blinkers off.

It worries me the amount of people who are simplifying the government's plans into a "hey that's a great idea, we should all be less selfish and help out more" - talk about something that won't alienate any segment of the voting population.

I raised this with my MIL, a traditional conservative voter, last night, after I read this thread. I genuinely gave up trying to open her eyes to the knock on effects this plan will have.

yellowvan said it best: "It's about making currently paid roles unpaid. It's about workfare (working for benefits), unpaid female labour and many other things."

It's crushingly depressing that it appears a significant percentage of the population, and quite a few MN posters, really don't seem to have any critical analysis skills whatsoever, and will defend the govt plans with such narrow-minded propoganda that "we all need to be less selfish".

sethstarkadder I agree with you that some 100% volunteer run museums can be very successul, but they rely on at least someone working to the same sort of standard and the same hours as a paid person, and having a huge level of knowledge and enthusiasm. I have worked with people like this before and it is fantastic. Only 2 out of 200+ though.

When these skills are utterly devalued - librarians, curators, archivists and the rest - having been replaced by volunteers, the standard of those institutions will have plummeted. But that's ok because the tories don't want to fund them anyway. Who cares if ordinary folk never get to see or understand art or history? That won't help them work in a call centre will it?

TheProvincialLady you are so right it is frightfully .

frgr, exactly. This Big Society volunteering 'idea' is nothing more or less than an attempt to cut local services. Nothing more - it is an utterly cynical exercise.

If anyone doubts this, please see this:

www.surreyhaveyoursay.info/survey/respond?survey_id=2470522

and the recent web chat we had with Grant Schapps.

My local council apparently places care for children and adults on a par with pavement maintenance - and we're being encouraged to say what we'll volunteer for. I've no doubt that if one area is regularly mentioned by respondents as something they'd like to volunteer for (not the same as a concrete commitment to do it), it'll be dropped by the council.

Never mind whether we are qualified to do it, who will pay to ensure that we don't pose a risk to the people we're volunteering to help or the fact that I was under the assumption that I paid my taxes to ensure that there was for, instance, adequate fire and rescue care in my community.

Or can I volunteer to do that, too?

YANBU

It's not about being less selfish. It's about getting public services on the cheap.

And that's entirely apart from the idea of conscripting people to 'volunteer'. That's a third world society, imo. Not a 'Big' one.

'sethstarkadder I agree with you that some 100% volunteer run museums can be very successul, but they rely on at least someone working to the same sort of standard and the same hours as a paid person, and having a huge level of knowledge and enthusiasm'

yes, they do.
a lot of towns have had this type of person in the past, someone who has lived there all their life and is utterly obsessed with local history, but it is all very random whether they exist or not, and when they die the whole thing can collapse.
my experience was of a volunteer-run museum that was not well-run in most ways (the collections management was practically non-existent for instance) and the museum was taken over by the county museum service and not improved by that, though everything will have been done to a higher standard - the community lost its sense of ownership and the keenest volunteers dropped out because it's not as much fun being told what to do by the professionals as it is running it yourselves.
It's the paradox of a collection being apparently not very well looked after but is actually safer because it is well-loved; my fear is that what will happen now is that a lot of museums will close and the collections will go into storage because you can't just impose a Big Society on a situation that is not used to being one. However the irony is that many of them will have been collected by untrained volunteers in the first place and actually they used to be run voluntarily, perhaps not very well, but at least with enthusiasm.
I think what I'm saying is that communities can do certain things but it has to grow from the grassroots not be imposed from above by taking away funding from a structure that depends on it.

Iwantanotherbaby , the underlying issue isn't that people don't want to do their bit. Trained, experienced workers are being made redundant, with the expectation that someone else will step in, either unpaid or as a condition of their benefits. You work full time - how happy would you be if you were made redundant from your job, in order for it to be done by a benefit claimant? Especially if the same applied to every other job in the field ? And all retraining facilities were cut, to rule out that option? Would you be willing to then see your family go without while you work for no pay ?

TDave isn't funding libraries, care homes, meals-on-wheels etc out of his own pockets; it comes from taxes. The taxes that are supposed to pay for the services that the nation needs.

"It's not about being less selfish. It's about getting public services on the cheap."

Agree with you LadyBunny.

Volunteering is effectively another way of paying (time is money for most people), so if we're also paying taxes, that means we'd be paying twice.

Most people quite rightly expect to be paid for their time. This is not selfish, it's normal and necessary. It's a luxury to be in a position to do more than a small amount of volunteering. The burden will probably fall mostly to housewives or women in low-paid part-time work. Why don't politicians do their jobs for free?

I'd rather have qualified, experienced people working in schools, libraries and so on. It's arrogant of do-gooders to think they can do "just as good a job", which is not usually true. They might think they can, but that's not the same thing.