Cut Your Cloth According To Circumstances

Zoe Williams is banging the drum for those poor, hard-done-by charities:

In the public sector, employees are battling a pay freeze, along with those "back-office redundancies" that Cameron always talks about as if it were mice and woodlice who would end up jobless, rather than human beings.

So we owe all human beings a job, now, do we? Regardless of whether that job actually needs to be done?

In the private sector it's business as usual …

Yes, and isn’t it nice to see the public sector finally getting a taste of that reality?

But in the voluntary sector, workers are seeing their salaries massacred. Everybody's doing it and nobody will talk about it; it's like going back to Victorian times.

Oh, noes!

You mean, back to the times when the state didn’t see fit to run everyone’s lives for them, directly or indirectly via fakecharities? Bring it on!

… it is clear that people who work for charities are facing what is annoyingly known as a perfect storm.

Really?

First, not-for-profit organisations were harder hit than any other sector by the financial crash, as they saw their reserves – which often weren't large to start with – dwindle.

Since they’re ‘not-for-profit’, why did they need reserves?

Second, there is more demand for their services, as hardship grows generally.

What sort of ‘services’? Are we talking about the likes of Alcohol Concern? Because they seem to be manufacturing their ‘demand for services’ out of whole cloth…

Third, the front-loaded local authority cuts mean councils are asking to pay less for the services they'd contracted out to charities.

Well, yes. That’s the budget crisis for you. Why should charities – especially those run as businesses – be exempt?

Fourth, these organisations are structured differently from the private and public sectors, tending to be smaller – almost a third have fewer than 10 employees, and only 4% have more than 500.

Then they should be more efficient and cheaper, shouldn’t they?

Fifth, donations are going down.

Yes, because, again, budget crisis. And if the public decide they can’t afford to support this particular cause, that’s something you’ll have to live with.

And sixth, just as a sideswipe, lottery funding is falling as well.

Same reason – budget crisis. You see, New Labour spent all the money, as the outgoing Chancellor was quick to point out. That was so funny, wasn’t it?

But who’s laughing now?

What the unions are worried about, and this anxiety appears very well-founded, is that in many cases the takeover institution won't even be in the third sector, it will be Serco or Capita, or another private sector giant. Their firmer financial footing allows them to be more competitive but, in the long run, they will be no substitute for a sector that, in the unemotive words of the Work Foundation report, "is characterised not only by distinct legal formations, but by an ethos that puts social and environmental interests above economic imperatives".

To translate, they waste money hand over fist on pie-in-the-sky schemes and social engineering….

This government's policies – specifically its massive cuts at local level – amount to a sustained attack on civil society. If charity were an industry – any industry, from fashion to financial services – someone in government would point out it contributes £116bn to the economy and employs 634,000 people, and so should be considered valuable even outside the respect that is due to its ethos.

Something isn’t ‘valuable’ simply because it employs people. If that were the case, we’d be better off employing people to dig holes, and other people to fill them in…