A town hall has defended its decision to break a formal promise not to replace staff with volunteers.
Trafford council plans to use only unpaid members of the public in two of its libraries instead of paid workers. It says otherwise libraries will have to shut.
But campaigners – including voluntary sector leaders – greeted the plan with outrage when it was announced in December.
"They said it devalued the volunteer and set a dangerous precedent.
Now council leader Matthew Colledge, who has admitted the move breaks a code of practice signed by the town hall and voluntary groups, says circumstances have changed. The plan would see all
paid staff at Old Trafford and Hale libraries replaced with volunteers as part of £16m in savings.
But the council’s own agreement states: "Volunteers should not be recruited to fill the place of paid staff.
"This could be seen as an exploitation of the volunteer and a deprival of someone’s livelihood."
The code of conduct formed part of the wider Trafford compact agreement that lays out how the council will work with community groups.
It sets out a ‘moral commitment’ to work with volunteers ethically. Mr Colledge said: "The compact was agreed in a time long before the true consequences of this country’s overspending hit home.
"Across the country, libraries are being closed with no option of being saved.
"In Trafford, local Conservatives are determined to keep ours open, and we are appealing to the community to help.
"Across Trafford, volunteers are consistently doing significant work and you only to have to look at the skill and courage of the country’s volunteer life boats crews to see that with the right support and training, volunteers can do important jobs."
Labour spokesman Mike Cordingley said the council had ‘ridden roughshod’ over the agreement.
He added: "Even if it needs revising, Coun Colledge should go back to the voluntary sector and bring them along with it instead of going it alone."
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I never realised the the RNLI replaced an existing service provided by local authorities.
Typical Tory attitude, bring in scab labour just to save a few quid. Remember Thatcher in the 80's ?
we need to introduce a bill of rights to stop the slave trade once and for all.
all that this will do is force the unemployed onto temporary work placements for 6 months at a time to keep the headline jobless figures down.
Before forming an opinion on this matter, could anyone inform me how much staff are paid in the library including pension benefits upon retirement. I believe that many are extremely well educated, perhaps over-educated to be stamping books with return dates.
That analogy using the RNLI is absolute rubbish. The RNLI is a registered charity not a council department and no full time worker was ever replaced by volunteers as they are ALL volunteers except for one station and the full time engineer at each station. Besides which they only respond when needed. What do they expect librarian volunteers to do, turn in on a phone call when someone wants to change a book. Ill thought out and impracticable nonsense.
In answer to a question on this article, a typical library assistant is paid around £15,000 per year, although normally they are part-time. A small library normally would have two or three full-time equivalent staff. Their pay has been frozen for the last year and was less than inflation the year before that. Their pay is also frozen for at least the next two years.
Assuming that they are not soon to retire, their retirement age will be 67. Their pension will be worth 20% less than they had been counting on for their working lives due to the current changes.
Leaving aside the ethics of using volunteer life boat crews as an argument for making staff unemployed, the pros and cons of volunteers in libraries is explored at http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/p/volunteer-run-libraries.html
He'll be putting children down chimneys soon.