Did you know 2005 has been officially designated ‘Year of the Volunteer’?
Didn’t think so. But then you have probably been too busy working or playing to have had your attention drawn before now to this fact. Well, since you have found a spare moment to read this blog, let me tell you about it.
Under this Home Office-backed scheme, each month is to be given over to some special theme around which individuals and corporations are to be encouraged and funded to engage in or develop forms of this activity.
This month’s special theme is health, an especially fitting one, given the beneficial effects volunteering has been claimed to have upon the health of those who engage in it.
The alleged health benefits of volunteering make this month’s theme an especially fitting one with which to commence this special year in light of a disturbing report in today’s Daily Telegraph that claims almost half the British work-force lies awake at night ‘worrying about their work and home lives’.
Since part of the Government’s aim in focussing this year on volunteering is to encourage employers to grant employees time off to engage in it, then, given its alleged health benefits, the British work-force would seem shortly able to rest more easily in their beds a’night.
If only life were that simple!
Last September, Digby Jones, Director General of the CBI, was reported as having called upon employers to make pay rises and promotions conditional upon the willingness of their employees to engage in ‘volunteering’, proposing half their time doing so be 'donated' from the employee's leisure.
Small wonder Digby Jones received a knighthood in this New Year’s Honours List!
If the Director General of the CBI is calling upon private sector employers to make volunteering a condition of employee advancement in the workplace, you can be sure the day is not far away before the public sector does so.
The result of its becoming such will, doubtless, be to nullify whatever health benefits volunteering might once have had brought to those who engaged in it when truly voluntary. As it is, like so much else within the so-called voluntary sector, even individual voluntary activity seems about to become nationalised under the Government’s relentless and seemingly unstoppable drive to control and regulate every aspect of our daily lives.
It would seem even our nightly rest is to fall shortly under its sway – at the undoubted cost to the national health.
Welcome to 2005, Year of the Volunteer, and its special theme this month, health!