A Eush of Applications Flooded the Call for London Olympic Games Volunteers.
The importance over the Tokyo 2020 volunteers being unpaid or being compensated.
Toyo Keizai | Original Article Here
Journalist: Kobayashi Kyōko
Full Article:
The volunteer recruitment process for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic/Paralympic games has opened. The organising committee, who is looking to recruit 80,000 volunteers in total, is looking to recruit at least 30,000 from Tokyo itself.
The voices of those who say that the volunteers should be compensated are growing daily but, the London 2012 games had 70,000 so-called ‘game makers’, who acted without pay (as volunteers are fundamentally unpaid) and were indispensable during the running of the games.
Phrases such as “worthy but exploitative” And “Black-volunteering” are starting to become commonplace.
- What is the original meaning of ‘Volunteer’?
Let’s first reconfirm the meaning of ‘volunteer’. The English word ‘volunteer’ originally came from the Latin, voluntārius (one who hopes, one who acts freely of their own instincts), and in the 1700s was applied to one who applied to the conscript army - in other words, a voluntary recruit. Nowadays, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary it lists both ‘volunteer soldier’ and ‘A person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task.’
Those who back the paying of the Olympic Volunteers argue that the meaning ‘unpaid’ is not implicit to the word ‘volunteer’. And thus flows the argument that even if one says ‘volunteer’, there is still the possibility for payment. However, the English word ‘volunteer’ does, in fact, mean ‘of one’s own volition’, and therefore also includes the notion ‘without payment’.
For an example of this written clearly somewhere, let’s take the unified council of English Volunteers, called officially the NCVO, who say that the actions of Volunteers are those who act ’without payment and with their own time in helping other people, groups, or environments’. Even if this is an explanation given to English Governmental Volunteers, it is assumed that a volunteer will work for no wage.
That the mind of a volunteer is ‘someone who helps another without the need for payment’ is rooted in the mind and lives of all English people.
In the heart of most busy British towns you can find what is called a ‘Charity Shop’ - places where second-hand items are sold. The shop itself is run by Volunteers, and the people of the city who wish to donate no longer worn clothes, unused toys, stationery, table/houseware and so on can bring them to these shops, and then these items are there resold at a cheaper price. The majority of the profit made on these items are then used by the establishing company of the shop (e.g in cancer research, help for the aged, helping those in poverty, and so on).
In each shop, the manager will take a salary however, their role is to classify all the donated items into categories, and those who work behind the register do so unpaid and thus are all called ‘volunteers’. Like in many small businesses, the two main job roles [here volunteer and manager] are similar so the volunteers could soon be taking their own paycheck [aka, move up to managerial roles]. However, those who come to work in these specific shops do so simply because they wish to fill up their free time. If there were no such volunteers who would work for no pay, the charity shop system would soon crumble to the ground.
The volunteering focus on English society emerged in the 1200s due to the strong societal focus on Christianity. In the 1800s century the Volunteer company’s prototype - each county’s volunteering body - was established, and in the 1900s the NVCO was born. Until this day you can still see the internationally famous Oxfam came from this movement (founded in 1942).
- Annual Volunteering Participation Figure is approx. 30%
Jane Walker, my neighbour and just-turned-80 year old, lives alone. For ten years or more, she has been using the equipment at the local old people’s home. She yells happily of how despite the old people’s not being able to move their bodies, they are still ever so happy when you bring the embroidery that I’ve done but won’t use. She says of how she becomes happy just by seeing he joyful face of the other old person she’s helped.
According to the NVCO’s records, 27% of the population volunteers wither individually or through a group once a month, and the figure skyrockets to 41% when considering how many people do some form of voluntary work once a year. (Statistics from 2015-16 Community Life Survey)
Common volunteer activities for these charities include fundraisers, participating in events, and backing the running of such events, and these organisations can be anything: sports, arts, hobby, cultural-exchange, or religion backed. The top reasons given for participating in volunteering were: ‘in order to promote or support other people’s lives’ (61%), ‘in order to help realise the aims of the charity’ (39%), ‘I had some spare time’ (30%), ‘Because I wanted to use the skills I have’ (30%).
According to Sports England - one of the largest sports-based charities in England - across all counties 14.9% of the population, that is, approx. 6,700,000 people volunteer in helping to get more people involved in sports activities. ‘If we don’t get more people involved, a lifestyle like this will end’ (the Vision of Sports England). These kinds of volunteers range from Coaches to Running Coordinators, from Financial Managers to Recruiters, and so on.
Sports England’s vision is to ‘to reach and help others, with uncompensated volunteers’. The key word here is ‘uncompensated’.
Volunteers do so on their own initiative, although it is common for them to be given travel stipends and money for food - if necessary. According to Sports England, Volunteers aren’t employees. In other words, from the company employment office point of view, the two sides have no relationship. If they were to have some sort of relationship, then the volunteers would be the lost possible rung on the company pay scale.
In an environment like this, where volunteering is part of daily life, it is no surprise that when the call was put out for 70,000 volunteers for the London Olympic/Paralympic games, 240,000 people raised their hands.
- To London, where those who volunteered did so alongside athletes.
In the midst of this 3-fold the size needed volunteer base, those who were called to action were given the name ‘game-makers’. With the meaning, ‘those who enable the games to run’, it is based on the fact that the Olympics is originally called in English the ‘[Olympic] games’. In short, they were named as such so that all the volunteers can feel as though they really did make the games happen. And although they were not paid, the Game Makers were given a uniform, travel stipend, and food on the day of service (if necessary).
Of the 70,000 volunteers, some 8000 volunteers from London (Team London Ambassadors) were delegated the task of showing tourists to the various grounds, directing traffic, and I myself saw several of them scattered around the city.
After the Games ended there was a parade held for the athletes. However, with the athletes marched the volunteers. They received a large cheer from all those in the city watching. Ms Tomomi/Chiharu Nishikawa, who was a volunteer in the Olympics, said ‘much like the athletes are the elite sportsman representatives of the country, so too are the volunteers the representatives of the general public’. (From: ‘The book for those who want to be volunteers in the Tokyo Olympics’).
According to the London Olympics Volunteering Committee’s website, Mr Paul Wignol(?) said that he became a volunteer because ‘I’ve been an Olympics fan for a long time’. He was 60 at the time of applying to be a volunteer. He had experience as both a taxi driver and a sports coach, and so passed the inspection.
His experience as a Welcoming Volunteer was ‘the best. For the city and for the U.K.’. Because he got to be a part of such a big experience.
However, how was the 2016 Rio Olympics for recruiting volunteers? Brazil is not known to have such an entrenched volunteering society as the U.K., and the 1,700 people who acted as ‘City Hosts’ during the game were compensated.
One who did participate in these games as an unpaid ‘Rio Volunteer’ was Mr Kenji Akasawa, of Japan’s Governmental Accountancy Office. He worked from 2012-16 in KPMG’s office in San Paolo, and he said that ‘it was South America’s first Olympics. I absolutely had to participate.”
- The celebration of those who do it from their own initiative
Using the holiday days he’d saved up to travel the 450 miles from Sam Paolo to Rio, he became one of the volunteers who helped in the golf events as an attendant to the ‘Protocol Team’ (the team is made up of representatives from each company’s athlete(s)).
It lasted a total of 10 days. As two of the days fell on the weekend, Mr Akasawa ended up taking a full week off work, which was tricky for his company to manage.
In the case of the Rio games, it was the management company who was responsible with the cost of pre-paid public transport tickets and food for the volunteers. As for Mr Akasawa, he was responsible for his own Air BnB and flight costs.
After the Olympics, Mr Akasawa stayed on to help with the Paralympics, after seemingly having such a good time the first time around. ‘In the improvised teams, there were lots of people of different nationalities from different countries’. And using all his might, he realised that he successfully managed to participate in a Portuguese-organised and speaking event.
The morale of the team was high, and ‘we were the chosen volunteers, so we could smile very sincerely with pride’. Mr Akasawa has applied for volunteering in the Tokyo Olympics.
Now and for much longer, I’m sure that the voices who cry ‘you must pay the Tokyo Olympics Volunteers’ will continue on. However, if, like ‘employees’ they are paid, then the job becomes not something that they chose to do of their own initiative but something they ‘must’ do, and thus the feel of the role changes. At the very least, if the volunteers for the 2020 Tokyo games are paid, the British onlookers will certainly be surprised.
Comments:
NO NAME:
Upvotes: 313. Downvotes: 24
Everyone, let’s work our hardest and make the Olympics a success!
It’s the Olympics, something in which we must be united as a country, so I thought I’d like to apply but, from the very start the organisers have been a bunch of plagiarising bastards and what’s more they’ve killed off some of their own, and even though they say it’s all fine, they’re spending 2,000,000 Yen (=approx. $17,800) a month with such a wasteful mindset, I just can’t bring myself to support them anymore.
Only one part of those companies aren’t squandering their profits.
If we could get a surge in patriotism, I’d want them to go ahead and use the money.
It would’ve been good if we could’ve recovered the tax money.
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NO NAME
Upvotes: 272 Downvotes: 19
Volunteering isn’t entrenched in our culture, but we all want everyone to do well, and I want to work with them, too.
If people didn’t think like this, then there would be serious trouble for the Tokyo Olympics.
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NO NAME:
Upvotes: 159 Downvotes: 7
Volunteering isn’t entrenched in Japanese society???
Volunteers gather after earthquakes, floods, all kinds of disasters for all kinds of times! They weren’t compelled by anyone, and of course they did all that for free! When you want to help someone out, or feel the need to do something, in those troubled times everyone gets together.
Anyway, the Olympics.
The Olympics is simply one of the big commercial events. And if those who are profiting off the workers get paid, then it's only natural to pay the workers, right?
And, from the sponsor's side, they're being a right pain in the arse on commuting roads such as the one by the famous Tsukuji Market (T/N: a famous fish market in Tokyo), and since the Olympics will be in summer they'll need to be prepared for it, whilst they're shamelessly spending tax money and saying and doing as much as they want. They're getting fat off other's work with such a calm face.
And who's cooperating with whom there?
I hate it.
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