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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to see that the government regulations on employing people make it too hard for the government to bother going through with them, so they try to find a backdoor by hiring volunteers instead. One would think that the government will think on their feet and relax the burden at least in the time of life-threatening crisis.

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These burdens are put in place to prevent employer (as in superiors, not the folks you serve) abuse. They would abuse government servants here and there if it were easily replaced.

You mean like instead of abusing them by asking them to volunteer?

There is a big difference between being abused by your employer, on which you depend with your livelihood, and being a volunteer, who can literally walk away anytime without consequences.

You can also walk away anytime from employment without consequences. You just stop making money. At least that's how it is in America. Is UK government regulation different?

How is “not making money” not a consequence, exactly?

It is a consequence, but it is a consequence of both employment and volunteering.

No, it is a consequence of not being employed which is clearly what I wrote above and why you cant compare those situations.

That is not true in the UK. Walking away 'any time' can seriously impact your potential to get another job.

I fail to see how a scenario where you can walk away any time and are being paid could ever be more abusive than a scenario where you can walk away at any time and are not being paid.

Not everyone works in cushy software-engineering jobs like us. minimum wage workers most of the time do not have a choice: its either work this job or none.

I urge you to not assume your position is the standard and to see beyond your nose.

In the UK you can't walk away anytime unless you have a job to go to, because making yourself intentionally unemployed means you have severely limited access to benefits.

How are you abused if I give you an option to volunteer?

Emergency powers should override that.

Can't wait until the next financial meltdown (no, not this one) and worker rights are rolled back because it's an "emergency".

What's happening now isn't just a financial crisis.

There's a very obvious and very real additional factor at play here.

Sure, I get why the regulations are there. However, here they clearly fail to serve their purpose. Are they going to protect volunteers from abuse? If not, then why should they be allowed to even use volunteer help? If the argument is that volunteers can just walk away when they don't like the conditions, why not simply give the same opportunity to paid workers? My point here is that regardless of whether the regulations have good reason or not, trying to work around them by hiring volunteers is utterly ludicrous.

And here's the Bill that is aimed at doing just that, amongst a whole bunch of other things. Emergency volunteering, changes to business leases, relaxation of rules about claiming NHS pensions while working for the NHS, retention of DNA samples, changes to funerals, fewer double-checking measures on mental health orders, suspension of free movement and association, wartime arrest and detention powers, ...

* https://services.parliament.uk/Bills/2019-21/coronavirus/doc...

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