Last week was Volunteering Week. Social media was brimming with warm, human stories about the work people do as volunteers. We should, without doubt, celebrate the human desire to help others, contribute to the health and well-being of our communities and make a difference. It is a natural state of affairs and has been going on as long as humans have existed. Sociability and empathy have been at the heart of our relationships with others from early societies to the present day. It’s in our DNA. Humans have always relied on cooperation to ensure the good working of societies from the early hunter gatherers who hunted or foraged together and shared food and childcare to the later more sophisticated societies which planted seeds and harvested crops, built granaries to store them, organised their living spaces and defended them from external hostility.
Today, in our ever more complex societies, the recognition of our connections to others and the desirability of working together are no less important. However, over the last few decades the ascendance of the ideological agenda of the ‘market’ with its focus on the promotion of the individual we have witnessed subtle changes in how we view as individuals our place in society and our relationships with others. Over decades we have been encouraged to think in terms of maximising our self-interest and advancement by placing them over and above the collective good. However, we may finally be waking up to the fact that these ideologically induced cultural changes have allowed governments to co-opt market reasoning into their policy decisions in order to promote self-reliance over cooperation and deliver the neoliberal agenda of the ‘small state’ serving capital. Not only are we witnessing the commodification of many activities previously viewed as public goods but also changes in the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the society in which we live. We are being commodified to serve a market driven world even for ostensibly altruistic actions such as volunteering.
Jon Dean at the Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics, Sheffield in his paper Volunteering, the Market and Neoliberalism (2015) quoting from B Kunkel’s Utopia or Bust (2014) notes that:
“Capitalism is better understood as designating a society that subordinates all processes – notably the metabolism between humanity and nature, the production and distribution of goods and services, the function and composition of government, and, of course, market exchange – to the private accumulation of capital.”
We will all remember the launch of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. How could we forget? He described his drive to empower communities as a great passion and said in his speech in 2010 that groups should be able to run post offices, libraries, transport services and shape housing projects (indicative of the direction we have been travelling in ever since). He called it a ‘big advance for people power.’ At the time The Times newspaper also described it as ‘an impressive attempt to reframe the role of government and unleash entrepreneurial spirit’ thus giving away in an instant what the real objectives were’. Hidden behind the rhetoric and fine sounding words was not altruism, but something darker and much more insidious, which has led us to a place of public impoverishment as the public and social infrastructure crumbles under the weight of on-going austerity and cuts to public spending.
Appealing to people’s desire to serve, even if it is often couched in the marketised language of how we can promote our own interests, volunteering has stepped into the breach to become the new norm for delivering services previously delivered by the state with paid employment.
The implementation of this policy, which coincided with huge cuts to public expenditure which government claimed falsely were necessary to get the public accounts back into balance, makes the connection transparent. The Labour leader Ed Miliband called it a cynical attempt ‘to dignify its cuts agenda, by dressing up the withdrawal of support with the language of reinvigorating civic society. He suggested that the Big Society was a ‘cloak for the small state’.
Indeed, David Cameron’s claims that the cuts were temporary were soon to be exposed as a smokescreen when he announced in 2013 that spending would not resume even once the ‘structural’ deficit had been eliminated. As he indicated his aim was in fact to create a ‘leaner, more efficient state’. And there you have it. The modus operandi.
In hindsight, we can see the distance we have travelled since the Big Society was first mooted and at the time mocked by many. It has become ever clearer that this was to be seen as a deliberate strategy to cut expenditure on publicly delivered and funded infrastructure and social well-being to deliver a small state (whilst providing a funding stream for corporations) which would then become dependent on a growing army of volunteers for service delivery. Anna Coote, a principal fellow at the New Economics Foundation, in her assessment noted at the time that:
“The cumulative effects of the spending cuts will have a strong influence on the way the ‘Big Society’ is realised. There will be many more people out of work, facing a punitive benefits system and drastically pared-down public services, and more polarisation between rich and poor neighbourhoods. Unpaid labour and the charitable and voluntary sectors are due to fill the gaps left by public services, providing support to increasing numbers of poor, jobless, insecure and unsupported individuals and families. […]
The ’Big Society’ will be profoundly influenced by the new austerity; it is also intended to make the new austerity politically feasible. The combined consequences of harsh spending cuts and a shift of responsibility from the state to ‘civil society’ should leave no doubt that the ‘Big Society’ and the Government’s economic policies are interdependent.
[….] Together, plans for a ‘Big Society’ and spending cuts on an unprecedented scale seem to mark the end of the post war settlement. We move from pooling responsibility through the machinery of a democratic state to dividing it between individuals, groups, localities and organisations in the private and voluntary sectors.’
Regrettably, she couldn’t have been more prescient. Worse, as local government has seen its budgets cut through reductions to government funding, the knock-on effect has been that the voluntary and charitable sector has found it increasingly difficult even to provide support in its communities, thus destroying one of the pillars of the concept of David Cameron’s Big Society.
Sifting through news reports during this week brings home the reality on the ground. A police force appealing for volunteer digital forensic analysts – the mind boggles thinking about that one – trained volunteers working for Hearing Help for Essex cleaning and retubing NHS hearing aids for patients, and let’s not forget the effects of cuts to local government spending on local services over the last nine years. In 2018 alone 130 public libraries closed in Britain as an extra 3,000 volunteers were brought in to run remaining services bringing them to a total of 51,394. Community run libraries are now the norm. To put that into context, in 2010 there were around 10 libraries being run by volunteers. In 2017 that had risen to around 500.
From parks and museums to local transport services and libraries, these are just some of the services that have been affected by cuts and are now being provided by the goodwill of volunteers. Even NHS England is getting in on the act as part of a cynical strategy to provide free labour by attracting volunteers in an ever financially constrained environment all under the pretence of serving the community. Already, figures show that there are around three million people volunteering in the NHS and care roles. Schools equally are coming under financial pressure as budgets are cut and staff lose their jobs which means they too are having to depend on more help from parents.
Volunteers have become increasingly a source of free labour to patch our underfunded public services – just sticking plasters in the increasingly chaotic provision of public services.
What are the alternatives? GIMMS asked a few weeks ago what sort of society we would like to see? What do we actually need to deliver a healthy nation and economy? Certainly, the last nine years of austerity have achieved the reverse, and an ideology which promotes trickle down of wealth has been exposed as a falsehood. A stagnating economy comprised of precarious employment and low wages, a social security system no longer fit for purpose and responsible for terrible suffering and too many deaths, an NHS on its knees and social care in chaos, not to mention local government in a state of collapse and no longer able to serve its communities effectively. These are all signs that the government’s economic record, too often couched in the myths of household budgets, deficits and debt, does not relate in any way to the daily misinformation regularly churned out by the propaganda gnomes who are in complete denial of the realities of people’s lives.
If we had a truly progressive government in place, what should be its principle aims? Apart from the really obvious, which is that government should immediately abandon austerity and frame its spending plans in the context of its sovereign currency issuing powers, it should also make a re-commitment to full employment and price stability.
So, what might this entail in a country where inequality and poverty reigns and globally we are facing the challenges of how to manage climate change? A world in which we need to transition to a less consumer, ‘stuff’ driven economic framework and work towards achieving both environmental sustainability and a reduction in poverty and inequality.
Firstly, our public services are the pillars that support a good society and a healthy economy today, and in the future, whatever that landscape looks like. A progressive government should recognise its role in ensuring, within the context of resources that are available, that they have sufficient funding to deliver efficient and effective services. People need good, well paid and secure jobs and the provision of public goods forms an important and necessary part of creating a society that benefits us all. Using the analogy of the human body, if one part is sick then without treatment it will ultimately affect other parts and cause a breakdown in health. From a purely practical point of view, money in people’s pockets makes the world go around and enables people to eat, have decent shelter and warm clothing, heat their homes and feel safe and secure as well as fulfil their social desires. That should be the aim of any government serving the public purpose.
And secondly, such a government should embrace, as part of its public purpose aims, full employment supported by a Job Guarantee. Frankly, no-one deserves to be left on the scrap heap of life to keep big business competitive or to support the myth of the trade-off between inflation and employment. An army of unpaid volunteers helps no-one, least of all the economy. If, in the first instance, these public-sector created jobs are needed, why should people not be paid to do a regular, permanent job in the public sector?
Or, in the case of an economic downturn, there should be the option to join a Job Guarantee programme; centrally paid for and managed locally to support communities. A voluntary Job Guarantee programme would not only provide a superior automatic stabiliser for the economy by keeping people properly employed during an economic downturn but would also provide the dignity and social inclusion that employment brings along with a living wage and on-the-job training. Such an arrangement would make it easier for people to transition back into the private sector when economic conditions improve, should they wish to do so. These are not workfare programmes, as is often claimed by those who oppose the JG, since they provide useful community work in a public sector setting with no compulsion or link to receipt of benefits.
Such a programme could also play a vital role in providing work during the transition from a carbon driven economy to one based on environmental sustainability. We need, without delay, to address the challenges posed in securing a sustainable energy network, an efficient public transport system and developing sustainable agriculture and resource use. The Green New Deal in the US which is now being mooted in the UK by left wing progressives is a small step forward but much more needs to be done.
Instead of supporting a UBI where the claim is that it will bring an end to poverty and address the so-called threat of AI and robots, left wing progressives should be promoting instead full employment and a Job Guarantee. What we call ‘work’ has endless possibilities for delivering a better, fairer and kinder world and save ourselves to boot. A UBI serves the interests of capital, not labour, and it is time to stop making compromises with it.
In conclusion, let’s celebrate those who give their time to locally based charities particularly retired people who have spare time and wish to give something back to their local communities, but it should never be at the expense of a paid job. It’s time to stop commodifying people to serve the needs of capital to make a profit and start serving the interests of human beings and the planet on which we depend for our survival.