would you volunteer to keep your library open?

[carriedababi]

?

Right

A lot happened yesterday. I am suddenly seeing several local families, middle class dual career graduate couples, about to become workless households. They are reeling in shock. These are people who played the game, doing everything the Government wanted of them in terms of studying hard, turning up to work, doing that bit extra, saddling themselves with a mortgage and so on. And they appear to have been sold down the river from what I can see.

Is there an ulterior motive here, an assumption that they will transfer their 'middle class' mindset of mucking in, and playing fair, and trying hard, to unpaid jobs while being paid £40 a week on the dole, or whatever it is, instead of earning a proper wage?

If so, I can see a lot of them turning up to these enforced volunteer placements and just sitting there with their arms folded like pissed off adolescents. I know I would. God forbid anyone makes me dust library books all day for £40 a week. We'd all be better off in prison sewing mailbags.

My dh is a local goverment accountant for social services, it's quite upsetting knowing they the do not have the money or resorses to deal with alot of child abuse case

it really makes me worry what this contry will become though

It's fucking terrifying.

I genuinely don't understand the world at the moment. It just doesn't make sense.

I'm starting to think that I MUST be missing something because it is all completely baffling and terrifying.

The policies just don't add up. The Big Society is a great idea as, in principle, we should all be encouraged to be more community minded and help. But there is no way it makes sense to do this by removing existing services and replacing employed people with volunteers, and expecting us to be happy about it. There is no societal gain in that.

I might 'volunteer' to be Prime Minister for a couple of hours a week.

What would make the big society work is, in a time of economic prosperity, to make it easier for individuals to volunteer. Incentives to set up social schemes/charities. Encouraging companies to allow additional time off for community responsibilities. Setting up franchises for new initiatives for local groups to set up.

All that seems to be happening now, is that we, in the best case scenario, we get the same services but noone has a job.

No I wouldn't, for the same reasons as everyone else.

I already have a job and two children to look after, and I could only afford to be out of the house more if I was being paid for it.

My sister is a librarian. She has a very good BA, an MA and IT qualifications. The idea that any old volunteer can just wander in and do her job is mindnumbingly moronic and insulting.

Also I would not contemplate enabling fucking Cameron's "Big Society" wank.

Haven't had time to read the whole thread, but I agree with the majority I've read in that I don't want my library run by amateurs, but by professional librarians. And I don't want to be filling in for someone who has lost their job.

AND I don't want my library run by people who are unaccountable. At the moment, if you don't like it, you can vote accordingly in the next election. If libraries are runon a voluntary basis, if you don't like it, well, you can just fuck off really.

Our school library is run entirely by parents and even our local secondary school doesn't have a professional librarian. It's a bloody disgrace. I am so furious with this government. So angry at what they are doing in the name of 'society'.

Exactly, blankstare.

But - I know Boffinmum was joking about this too - we shouldn't even joke about politicians' roles being unpaid. It was a big step forward for workers' representation that these jobs won salaries. Nothing important should be done for free, as you only get the people who can afford to work for free doing it.

But yes - in terms of people helping out in society - traditionally, as has been pointed out on other threads, it hasn't been legal for people on jobseekers to volunteer. you have to prove you are doing sod all to get the income. A reasonable approach to integrating formal volunteer work into the fabric of our society might have started with at least allowing job seekers to volunteer.

Then we could look at business. Given that most people in work, work sodding hard, we should look to business to provide the "give" that allows volunteering - employees to take the time out of their working week, not their nonexistent free time. Maybe the larger employers could set up schemes and provide the resources that volunteers can't (strategy, organisation, equipment costs, CRB costs, etc). Maybe smaller organisations could piggy-back on these or group together to form their own. Working with competitive organisations within your industry would be good for all sorts of reasons. Businesses thinking cooperatively would be a great step forward and good for society in general.

All this should be doing stuff that isn't being done already, or not done enough - not replacing paid employees.

'She has a very good BA, an MA and IT qualifications. The idea that any old volunteer can just wander in and do her job is mindnumbingly moronic and insulting.'

Quite.

I personally think a more useful economic model woutld be me taking my own BA and Post Grad, getting a job (start looking people, there must be one somewhere- can we share?...) and paying taxes towards keeping libraries open with librarians who pay taxes and buy services and hire nursery care and.....

I admit my degree isn't economics but it does seem obvious that work + taxes is the key. Cut benefits claims by creating work not just taking money away (anyone notice they launched the forest sell off backtrack the same day they are annoucing teh details of new benefits to make the vocal MCs think their voices are really being heard? stuff the needy, we've got a wood! (and yes I did sign the petition- it's the timing making me roll my eyes)

Quite so Scram. They are cynical beyond belief and not only that, they don't seem to be able to come up with a policy they can actually stick to either. And as for the lib-dems .

Roll on May, I say.

Roll on MArch for us, try and get mroe pwoers to the Assembly, minimise Tory input! m(radicl Welsh person? Somerset through and through, but liking the upsides of being exiled ehre-and we are exiled, by the cuts to disability provision in Somerset)

Vezzie, I previously worked for a large organisation.

They ran a scheme which allowed paid leave to voluntary commitments (within reason obviously). For example, a friend of mine was a school governor and he was allowed special leave for school governor business (meetings etc). Also, a friend volunteered as a Samaritan and was allowed a certain amount of time out for training (I may have got that wrong - it was definitely for something).

Also, every department was encouraged to take on a local community project once a year. We painted a children's playground, put on a play at a special needs school etc.

It was a great way of team building, great for company PR, improved staff moral and made us feel less like mindless workers.

This is the kind of private sector involvement the Government should be encouraging, not sacking people.

Blankstare exactly.

interestingly though many years ago I worked for the state- under the last Tory government so that shows how many eyars!- and was denied time off to train for a voluntary role (giving pedicures to people with diabetes and makeovers also- trained at that time as a make up and manicure bod). It wa sbecuase I had to attend some crap team motivation meeting, which seemed to consist of the office staring at a blank screen anticipating the Minister giving a speech (never happened due to technology) whilt the union leader tlaked loudly about how the event cost X which would have nationally saved Y jobs from the redundancy round taking palce (and Ias I was fixed term i was not eligible for any of the jobs anyway and due to be out on my ear).

Sorry, rant but does show it up a bit.

And if there is to be an element of coercion in volunteering (pace the inherent contradiction in that sentence) it should be employers who are coerced - ie they should be required to allow, if not facilitate, a certain number of volunteer hours per employee (even if these are only things that the employees have come with off their own bats, like blankstare's examples of people choosing to be Samaritans or scout leaders or whatever).

Doing these things in work time means people already have childcare in place; and realistically people will still fit all their work in so nobody loses. It is impossible to fit all these things in with no support from your employer and a ridiculous culture of presenteeism

Still, worth repeating - this should all be EXTRA stuff, not instead of paid roles

I do value libraries hugely - but at the same time, I know that our local council have to make cuts, substantial cuts to all their services. I had a chat to one of the local councillors about this, and he was very honest about the amount of pressure they're under, and the need to make a small amount of money go a very long way. Every pound that's spent on our libraries is money that isn't being spent on other services, most of them of equal or greater importance to the community.

A friend is a librarian at one of the major local libraries, and he is actually very positive about the choices that the council are making, knowing how difficult those decisions have been.

The Big Society

Oh bollocks. We live in a rich country. We don't need to be making fucking third world "tough choices" between education, literacy, sanitation and healthcare. for fucks sake. We solved all this fucking decades ago, in the last century. Why all this mealy mouthed collaboration?

the big society???

more like the big unemployed non educated iliterate society

but is it really a rich country? if we are deep in debt?

It's all relative. We aren't that much in debt relative to many occasions in 20c and 21c history.
The national debt is being overplayed for ideological reasons - the tories like cuts

There is however a real global banking crisis which is something else altogether - to do with lending and property derivatives, nothing at all to do with UK public services.

However you look at it, the UK is not a nation that should be thinking about solving its problems by getting rid of books and / or other basic public services (as if a. they are the "expensive luxuries" that caused all the problems and b. cutting education / marginalising literacy ever solved more problems than it caused). If people fall for this they are really pathetically easily led

I was being petulant rather than joking, but I wouldn't half like Dave and Nick to walk the walk of some of the people being shafted, for a protracted period of time as well.

No, I disagree. I think we do have to make these difficult choices. There are so many vital things that money can be spent on - I see and hear a lot about them in my work, and hear people talk as passionately about the need for other things to be funded as people here are speaking about libraries - and only a certain amount can be funded.

That may make me 'pathetically easily led', but I'd need to be convinced of this.

I've lived in developing countries, and I know just how different our services are to what's available there. By cutting library services, in no way are we talking about making the types of decisions necessary in the third world.

im a library information assistant (aswell as a student midwife) my mum and brother also work in libraries as senior library assistants and to lose their jobs would be devasating, the amount of abuse we get from the general public is ridiculous, when they have a go at you cause we havent got a book in or they have fines cause they havent brought their books back on time you really do feel like saying well why dont you come and do this job if you think its so easy but to be honest i dont think the libraries could be run by volenteers unless they were regular as i dont think it is that easy for someone to just come along for the day!

Boffinmum, I would like that too, but simply taking away their MPs' salaries won't go anywhere near putting them in that situation.

Grendelsmum, I believe that there are many other vital things, including life and death things. But I think that we are being played bby being offered non-choices, in the way that you trick a toddler who doesn't want to get dressed into "choosing" the red top or the blue top. By distracting him into the red vs. blue issue he loses his power to say what he really feels which is "actually I want to stay in my PJs and watch TV". This is fine because he is a toddler and shouldn't be allowed to control everything that is going to happen all day. But do we really want to be controlled like this, as if we aren't adults within a democracy? We shouldn't be accepting the terms of the debate at all.

My council (Doncaster) are apparently continuing plans for the awful Cultural Quarter that's been supposed to be going on for years while cutting half of the library branches in the borough.
That isn't even a difficult decision.

Isn't it just an excuse to pay librarians universal credit instead of their current wage ?