About volunteering

This reflection is based on my experience of volunteering at various times during my life, and especially during the last 12 years.

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1. Volunteering is a response to a need.

An organisation with work that needs doing will try to recruit the right number of volunteers to do it.

The amount of need determines the level of demand for volunteers.

2. Need is not determined by the number of people wishing to be needed.

An organisation which recruits volunteers without having needs to match them to is not a genuine volunteer organisation.

Unless of course there is an expectation that the needs will materialise before the volunteers' start date. In that case one would expect that the organisation has contacts and information which provide a realistic estimate of how many volunteers will be needed. Recruitment would be up to that number.

3. In 1. above, if it is found at some point that volunteers cannot be placed, the effort has been successful and there is no more need for volunteer work. Recruiting stops.

In 2 above, if volunteers cannot be placed, the principle that need is not determined by the number of people wishing to be needed has been demonstrated.

4. Volunteers should not compete with paid workers for jobs. Typically the need for volunteers occurs in specific and well defined contexts where there is not money for paid workers in sufficient numbers – conservation, support for the underprivileged and the old, rescue, research and archaeology are just a few examples.

If the work offered to volunteers by an organisation is conventional work (coffee shop or harvesting for example) it may displace paid workers (local or otherwise), be financially advantageous to an employer, and would be exploitation.

5. As they do not ask for payment, volunteers should feel the satisfaction of having done something constructive and worthwhile with their time. This is especially so where volunteers have had to spend some of their own money in order to work for free – travel costs to and from a project, for instance. They should feel their time and money have been well used.

If the work is token, just to keep people occupied, it is not volunteering, it is a pretext. Volunteers are likely to be disappointed and feel their time and money have been abused. It has to be said though that some may not be disappointed: they may relish the low level of work and spend their time enjoying the attractions of the places they have been brought to. However it is still a pretext – in this case with collusion.

In these cases, if payment has been made to an organisation by the volunteers for arranging things, that organisation is a travel agency by another name.

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The situation is not always simple.

Government departments, national parks, large charities and the like have the funds and expertise to support volunteers with accommodation, food, logistics and training; they have the facilities to advertise, select and recruit. Smaller charities or communities may well not have any of this.

There is help for them though. There are fund holders – charitable trusts and the EU for example – who are willing to supply funds and support in deserving cases.

Getting backing from these fundholding bodies is not easy. There's the paperwork, the fulfilment of the fundholder's particular requirements, finding the right fundholder etc. etc. This is where the middlemen come in.

These are organisations which are not part of any fundholding body, and do not have projects. They exist to provide a service for people wanting to volunteer and for those needing to find volunteers. Projects wishing to recruit apply to them for volunteers. They find the volunteers and source the necessary finances from the relevant fundholding body. Some of them will support, accommodate and transport the volunteers if necessary. This can be, and often is, a good service. Such organisations have the know-how to work through application procedures, deal with insurance and legal matters and arrange transport etc.

But it can also be a scam opportunity. The arrangement works well if the point made in 2. above is observed, that recruiting is matched to a realistic promise of need. If not, and recruitment is speculative, then the recruiting body may be faced with having to place un-needed volunteers who have arrived expecting to be set to work on something worthwhile. This is where there is a danger of token work and unfair competition against paid employees.

This is not a competent way of doing business, but no-one is benefiting, so where is the possibility of a scam? All monies paid out by fundholders have to be accounted for and the volunteer placement agencies cannot be for profit. But such bodies need staff: legal experts, secretarial staff, people skilled in the application process, drivers and leaders perhaps; they need an office; they need cars; they may buy provisions. Expenses need to be paid. And so on – it's not difficult to see how such things can be exploited for personal, family and friends' benefit: who gets the jobs and at what salaries and hours? What sort of cars, who gets them and how specific are the controls on their use? And so on.

Then there is the practice of making volunteers pay a fee to register, and having done so, pay again for 'extras'. There are cases where clients who are supplied with volunteers are required to feed them or pay for their food – when such costs have already been covered by the fundholder.

One's friends and relatives can be provided with free holidays as spurious volunteers.

This scope for milking the fundholders and the volunteers is obviously proportional to the number of volunteers passing through the agency's hands. So there is an incentive to recruit as many as possible, without regard for the actual need for them.

All this is dangerous for the cause of volunteering. The people who are paying for it through their taxes and donations can become cynical. Volunteering will get a bad name, being regarded as just a means for getting a cheap holiday for pretended work and for riding a gravy train. 

In places where agencies have previously sent poorly prepared volunteers, have taken money from clients, or have displaced people from paid employment, volunteers from reputable organisations are in danger of being treated with disrespect by people who have no way of knowing that they are different. This is a bad experience for people who have acted from the best of motives. They find themselves in an atmosphere poisoned by the disreputable agencies.

It is my personal view that middlemen agencies should not exist at all, that funding bodies should have their own departments to deal with allocations and that applications should be made direct to them or through some sort of clearing house system. 

If this is not possible then there needs to be much more rigorous scrutiny.  The application process for recognition and accreditation by fundholders should be much more rigorous. Paper check box systems with sentences that contain things like 'must show evidence that...' or 'should provide...' are a gift to an expert in the dark art of making applications. Closer attention should be paid to the experience of the volunteers with inspection of the agencies' work in the field. Agencies should have to back up their recruitment targets by showing hard evidence of expected need, and there should be transparency about who the volunteering is for.

About Environment: Me and My Cars - Again

Well, since I wrote that original piece there have been developments haven't there? That bit of dodgy VW software I mentioned was not the only malpractice going on.

Now we see that diesel emissions are dirtier than we thought (or were led to believe as some say). But let's be clear: all cars pollute. There's no point in shopping for a pollution free car. There isn't one – yet. Remember the point I made in my last piece: electric cars, given present generating methods, move the pollution somewhere else; they don't, as the slipshod talkers promoting them claim, abolish it. So we seek to find a car with as little polluting effect as possible. Well, I bought my diesel car four or five years ago, and it might be worth looking at how I made the decision.

I knew then that diesel cars pollute at point of use, that there are particulates and SO₂ etc. It's not new knowledge. Also, I knew that their polluting effect is at its worst in the warm up period after starting from cold – which takes longer I believe with diesel than with petrol.

 My car journeys are almost always long distance and away from dense populations. I judged that, on the kind of journeys I make, the pollution would be scattered away from urban areas where the effect is most damaging. I also judged that, as diesel is far more economical, I would be using less carbon fuel. And I felt that, being a less refined product, diesel would be going through fewer polluting processes during its manufacture than petrol.

As with all complex decisions in life, it's a case of making a judgement based on the information you have at the time. There are seldom perfect solutions based on Absolute Truth. My final conclusion was: for long journeys away from population centres – diesel; for urban use where a quick warm up to optimum efficiency is needed – an economical modern petrol engine. So in my case go for diesel.

And you know what? I'm not sure that, in the current circumstances, even with the 'new' information, there can be a different decision for a person with a limited budget. As Greenpeace said recently,

'Diesel and petrol are like a rock and a hard place with air pollution on one side and climate change on the other.'

As you will know if you have read my earlier post on this subject, I am enthusiastic about electric transport. As yet we don't have the production and distribution infrastructure to make it pollution free. But it's happening. I get my domestic power from a supplier called Ecotricity which, as the name suggests, gets its electricity and some of its gas from sustainable sources. Ecotricity is also leading the way in creating a car charging network. This is very exciting, upbeat and constructive. I urge you to read about it, here:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/for-the-road

I am eager to embrace electric transport. It's out of my reach now but I feel it'll happen sooner than I used to think – it's coming on fast. But I remain concerned about the generation aspect. If more electric cars means building more coal fired power stations, that's not going to solve our pollution problems is it? We need to get behind enterprises like Ecotricity and help them lead the way towards cleaner generation. 

(Update: Apparently, there's some good news on this -  even if the electricity comes from coal fired stations, it's still greener. See my post of 2019, One Liners Again )

Diesel is under fire because of the local pollution aspect: it's nastiest when concentrated into urban areas where we are forced to inhale its fumes. But it is the ubiquitous engine fuel of our planet. Mighty container ships, tractors, construction machinery, buses and trains depend on it. The emissions are still polluting even if not many people are nearby sniffing them. So converting cars away from diesel (and petrol) is to win a battle, not the war. There are big R and D and investment challenges ahead.

As a student of urban history I know that urban transport's localised pollution in the days before the internal combustion engine was utterly disgusting. Wading through horse-shit was a part of everyday life. The stink of horse-piss was up everyone's noses. Those scrapers you see by the doors of old houses were for scraping the cack off your shoes before going inside. Crossing sweepers would clear a path through it for you if you tipped them. The horseless carriage with its internal combustion engine was the clean new transport of its time.

And here we are again, facing problems with the effluent of the transport that replaced the horse. As it was then, so it is now: time for the next step towards getting clean.

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And now, in a time when tribal chanters line up and gurn at each across the media, shouting their binary banalities, I am not happy with Greenpeace's recent contribution to this issue. Whilst I agree in general with their position, I regret that they are adding to the mess of lazy tropes that wash around us.

As a long term paying supporter of Greenpeace I got this in an email from them recently:

'The car companies conned us all. They’ve been selling us diesel vehicles that they claimed were the “green” choice. But they lied. They manipulated emissions tests and sold us diesel cars that emit far more toxic fumes than they are supposed to. As a result, they have made air pollution worse.The only way to have clean air for us all to breathe is to ditch dirty fuels like diesel - and petrol - completely.Tell the car companies to ditch diesel and switch to 100% electric.'

[Sign the Petition]

Here's a comment from another paying Greenpeace supporter:

'Come on Greenpeace, this is a ridiculous petition. It is also about 5 years late and shows significant naivety in understanding of the issues.

1) Who exactly is “the car industry”? It is not a homogeneous conglomerate of conspirators but a collection of self-interested companies. So why are we campaigning in such an unfocused way when most car manufacturers are already spending money on R&D to design electric cars and are also preparing to produce them at scale! 2) Have you forgotten that governments told us Diesel is safe – why are we not picking on them? 3) This issue has already been addressed by the market. Greenpeace should have been campaigning about this 5 years ago when it was at least controversial – not when the direction of travel has already been decided by market forces. As a paying supporter of Greenpeace, I would ask you to spend money on tackling real issues, rather than climbing on the bandwagon of things that are already happening without Greenpeace’s help.' [My italics]

I tend to agree. But I think the bit about 'governments telling us' is getting close to conspirator-trope again. 

The guy does a nice rational criticism of Greenpeace's clumsy conspiracy theory. Then, almost as if he were uncomfortable without the support of a conspiracy theory, substitutes another one: we, the innocents, were duped by 'Governments'. Well I don't remember that. Back in the day there was stuff coming from all sorts of directions, including no doubt governments, in favour of diesel. It was a muddle of good and bad intentions, well-meaning people and assholes. 

Here we have a case of The Curse of Binary, a post-industrial thinking-disability where issues can only be conceptualised as consisting of two opposing forces, Goodies versus Baddies, with me being of course on the Goodies side and a victim of the Baddies. It plays well in the media. And that's what makes me uncomfortable with Greenpeace's approach. Binary is a thought process of the tribalist of whom I have spoken before. The thing to bear in mind, Greenpeace, is that tribal chanters don't ever convert anyone. Ever. They make like minded chanters feel good about themselves and look like an off-putting stereotype to the rest.

Right now we should hunt down punish and deter those motor trade assholes who deserve it, while getting on with cleaning up our transport act.

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You can see the Greenpeace petition here, along with the comment I quote:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/time-to-clean-up-car-industry-20170321



Update, early May 2017:

Well, VW are really going for the Assholes of the Year award aren't they? I've been about to publish this piece twice before, and had to modify it because of the emergence of dodgy behaviour from them. Now it looks like their correction of the original emissions problem isn't going too well:

 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/mar/25/vw-volkswagen-audi-skoda-seat-emissions-fix-left-car-undriveable




A Confession:

I own a big smelly old-school diesel engine! I love it. It powers my canal boat. There is a touch of magic about it. Unlike a petrol engine you don't have to set the fuel on fire with a spark to make it go. You squeeze it. And after the first time it goes on squeezing itself, with no input other than the fuel, like a kind of perpetual motion. To make it stop you have to intervene by decompressing it. It's like it's alive.

In my defence can I plead that, as I have a good solar electric supply on board I don't have to use the engine to generate power for my domestic arrangements? I only need it to move the boat about. And I don't use an enormous lot of fuel for that: around 50 litres a year (that's right, 50, it's not a typo). There are electric power units on the market now and it would be nice in future to fit one. They are almost silent and it would be lovely to noiselessly slide through the countryside with only the sound of rippling water and the birds. But I would miss my big mid-20th century air cooled chugging diesel. Perhaps I should put it on a plinth and just look at it and polish it once in a while.

Worker Free Products - Yet Again

A short post, this one, just to flag up further stuff about this issue and its consequences for us all. 

Driverless cars are on the way as we are all aware. I for one will be pleased when I can sit having a coffee while my car does the driving. But the consequences of the much more imminent onset of driverless trucks are much less relaxing. This article in the Guardian is typical of many on the subject:

 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/17/self-driving-trucks-impact-on-drivers-jobs-us

You can add this to the other examples I set out in my article on the problem at 

https://whysgetsserious.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/about-economics.html