Charities take advantage of volunteers

Joe,

That was an interesting letter ("Confessions of a lazy dumpster diver") from the reader about Habitat for Humanity. They're actually OK in some other countries (they're run locally) but it's no surprise the US branches are screwed up.

I did a lot of volunteering around my burg for a while. I did a stint for Catholic Charities, until I threw my back out. I picked up all their donations, and I noticed after a while that I was the only person in the office not getting paid, the only person doing actual physical work on a regular basis, and I'm not even a Catholic or a church-goer. There are maybe 100,000 Catholics around here, but I did all their volunteer heavy lifting.

Come to find out volunteers don't get Workmen's Compensation. Catholic Charities is also deeply offensive, in that you have to sit through a training video at the beginning that states that volunteers are the most likely people to molest children. Hello! I thought they hired the priests to do all the child molesting, but maybe that was just my imagination.

At another outfit I volunteered to give free rides to medical appointments for people with HIV. Once they gave me $10 for gas, out of maybe 50 rides I gave. They got taxis to take the patients if they had no drivers like me. If they weren't such cheap bastards I would have kept doing it. They could afford $40 a pop for a taxi, but couldn't throw me $10 once a month for gas.

I checked on volunteering for a hospice one time. By law hospice companies have to get volunteers to donate 5% of all hours or they don't get paid by Uncle Sam, so they all have volunteer directors to recruit volunteers non-stop. Another get-something-for-nothing grab.

The average non-profit seems to be set up in many ways to take advantage of volunteers, who do most of the real work, while the paid staff gets all the gravy. Non-profits, for all their propaganda (and there are many exceptions) are basically like the rest of the US workplace -- dreary hotbeds of infighting, backstabbing, boot kissing, idiocy, buck passing, and above all trying to get somebody else to do the job for free.

Many of these outfits try to get volunteers by playing to people's altruistic instincts, but any volunteer with any sense can see after a few months that they are just being taken advantage of.

I could go on with other examples of places I had experience with in my own local city (don't get me started on Feed the Children) but the story is almost always the same. This is the US after all, and like you said, everything is a racket.

Barry
Oklahoma