The Staff Volunteer identity reflected the practical interests of ‘new mangers’ in looking after their work interests and was used deliberately to effect change. The use of the term ‘staff’ instead of volunteer, was a deliberate strategy to gain resources for volunteers by avoiding the barriers of the Moral and Professional identity. Volunteers were sceptical of the identity but some did draw on it to argue for resources. The Staff Volunteer identity worked to either avoid the barriers of the Moral Volunteer identity, or to open up the discourse of volunteer workforce to managerial concerns. This opening up of ambulance volunteer identities in turn created some potential
lego-juridical difficulties at the interface between volunteers and ambulance services.
The Staff Volunteer identity was overtly political and highlights how the ‘new managers’ positioned themselves as fighting against dominant ‘traditional manager’ interests. The following quote identifies perceived problems associated with using the term volunteer:
New manager Sophie: The whole area of resourcing for the regional workforce is enormous and has never been properly addressed because the moment you say the word volunteer, everybody shuts down. That’s why I don’t use the word.
‘New managers’ needed to break the barriers around the dominant volunteer identities in order to engage ‘traditional managers’ in discourses about resourcing volunteers. Sophie directly claims a problem with using the word ‘volunteer’ when seeking resources for rural (i.e. mostly volunteer delivered) services. She suggests the lack of resourcing is an ‘enormous’ problem, and directly links this to the term ‘volunteer’. The claim that ‘everybody shuts down’ when resourcing is raised in connection with volunteers suggests that the dominant Moral Volunteer identity is a real cultural entity that produces significant structural effects for volunteers. While who ‘everybody’ is, isn’t specified, the reader must assume that everybody includes those who have the power to allocate resources, and this is likely to be either ‘traditional managers’ or government funders of ambulance services. The power of Staff Volunteer identity work to affect interests and initiate change is related to the way it allows access to new managerial and equity discourses.
However, ‘new managers’ also introduced new tensions and managerial concerns through the use of the Staff Volunteer identity. Because the Staff Volunteer identity was used to align volunteers more closely with paid staff there were difficulties in linking with the long-standing community assumptions of the Moral Volunteer identity. Instead new issues around volunteers as employees were uncovered. Some ‘new managers’ believed this may pose future legal problems:
New manager Danielle: And I think that there’s premature extremes, one is that …are people getting to the point…, I really value our volunteers, but we’re getting to the point where we’re starting to get really confused about what is a volunteer and they’re looking, as I said to you over the phone, they’re looking a lot like staff and employees in terms of common law of employment. And I think that in a way I feel like we’ve almost lost the essence of what a volunteer is because, you know, the uniform, the training, everything is covered. Which is great but now we’ve got to be careful about which policies they do actually come under because to me then there is absolutely no difference between them and an employee. Interviewer: mmm, and is that something that you think…is discussed? Danielle: No. No and I’m not going to, given I’ve got industrial relations sitting with me, I need to be careful!! No, I’m actually, a little bit in the back of my head, a bit fearful for the first case where someone actually says, well I’m actually an employee rather than…so no it’s not discussed.
The legal ramifications of a volunteer workforce have not been thoroughly
considered within ambulance services. It is only quite recently that issues around the legislative protection for volunteers have been considered (Omar 1998). More specific to the volunteer service interface are Danielle’s concerns about how far a volunteer can be incorporated within an organisation without becoming an
‘employee’ and the legal implications for ambulance services if volunteers should claim employee status. However, she is clearly not keen to discuss the issue openly and indicates forcefully that it is not an open topic within ambulance services (‘No. No.’). The uncomfortable nature of the topic is also shown by her hesitancy, and hedging in the excerpt, and the low force and clarity of the theme.
By positioning the services as responsible for volunteers, new complications and issues are raised. If they are staff, volunteers become more visible in policy and procedure terms new issues around risk management are opened up. It is ‘new managers’ with knowledge about the services’ legal and judicial obligations to employees who understand the problems involved in either highlighting or not highlighting the Staff Volunteer identity. Danielle highlights her own difficult
position in that she is nervous about industrial trouble that may arise from raising the issue, but is equally concerned about ‘the first case’ where someone claims the rights of an employee not a volunteer. Danielle suggests that ‘we’re starting to get really confused’ about volunteers and links this to the Staff Volunteer identity.
Positioning the volunteer workforce as a responsibility of the ambulance service was a key difference between the Staff Volunteer identity and the Moral and Professional Volunteer identities. Representing volunteers as responsible for ambulance services is an assumption of agency as it is expected that volunteers and communities have the capacity to effect service provision or volunteer support. However, by positioning the ambulance services as having legal responsibilities for volunteers under the Staff Volunteer identity, the lack of resources and policies for volunteers could be foregrounded as service obligations. Equally, by positioning volunteers within ambulance services the responsibility for service delivery was placed with the organisation and not the community. The key role of agency in ambulance volunteer identity work is considered in greater depth in the following chapter, but at this point it is the consequences of differences in the representation of agency that the analysis of volunteer identities has highlighted.
In summary, the Staff Volunteer identity is a new identity that positions the volunteer within the ambulance organisation. It is used by ‘new managers’ to argue for more resources and to improve service processes for supporting volunteers. The Staff Volunteer identity works to represent ambulance volunteers as the responsibility of the ambulance services in a way that the other identities do not. The organisation is positioned as being responsible for both the delivery of service and care of the volunteer workforce. This identity work has achieved some increase in resources for volunteers by drawing on discourses of sustainability and lego-juridicial responsibility for workers. Staff Volunteers are increasingly incorporated under service policies and procedures, and discriminatory processes, such as the difficulty in accessing paid ambulance work, are beginning to be dismantled. But the benefits for volunteers are limited to those areas where volunteers’ interests overlap with ‘new managers’ and because of resistance to the identity it is possible that ultimately changes may not deeply affect the status quo.
There is resistance to the use of the Staff Volunteer identity by both volunteers and ‘traditional managers’. Some volunteers exhibited cynicism towards the way that the Staff Volunteer identity was used in a polyvalent manner to suit changing needs. ‘Traditional managers’ resisted the identity because it challenged the status quo by requiring new funding or changed financial priorities, with accompanying conflicts with established interests. Even ‘new managers’ experienced some difficulty with the Staff Volunteer identity as it resulted in uncertainty about where the legal boundaries between volunteers and employees could be drawn. These concerns however, were well hidden, and instead it is the fears and concerns of a more demanding
self-interested volunteer that are openly discussed in ambulance services.