Paid leave for Volunteering work

viktory

If any company offered additional leave for one member of staff to carry out volunteering work, then they would have to offer it to all the staff. Then you have the issue of policing the leave - how do staff prove that they are volunteering? What do you say to staff that state that they are not volunteering but are taking their ageing aunty or mother to the hospital so that is sort of volunteering?

I agree with the majority - the idea of volunteering is to help others for no gain (taken from Wiki...Volunteering is the practice of people working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain...) so no, you should not be given additional free holidays from your employer. You should either take the days unpaid or not do the volunteering work. PLan ahead next time - clearly at the moment your holidays are more important than your volunteering work.

Spirit_2

You are on a work placement. I think the clue is in the title. You are placed there to work

With regard to additional paid time off - it would be unusual to give a sandwich student all of the 'perks' that may be available to a substantive contract holder. Why not ask for the most likely support that they will go to - unpaid time off.

As an employer if you asked me for paid time off for this situation I would be disappointed and think that you had not grasped the economic reality of business, personal accountabilty for planning & resourcing your work life balance ,nor were you emotionally intelligent to the impact/fairness with colleagues.

Options that you could consider are:
Change you holiday plans to prioritise the camp.
Cancel the camp.
Ask if you can make the time up/build up Time off in Lieu for the camp.
Ask for some unpaid time.
Investigate if it fits with any of there development programmes - so that a day or two of it counts as working time as it contibute to your 'leadership development'.

Emmzi

Simon11 wrote: »

I've planned my holiday very well. Since I started in Beg of Sept I've only had 6 days off work( 3 for christmas and another 3 for volunteering with youth group), and been foricing myself to keep going and saving them up for Family and friends holiday.

I havn't been wasting them as your suggesting with your post above.

Not wasting, but not prioritising either.

In life, you cannot have everything, and the role of your employer is not to make sure that you can. And in the real world of work sometimes there are no holidays, and 6 or 7 day weeksk for months at a time. Your post suggests naivety about this and I hope you find an employer as idealistic as yourself.

pinkshoes

I think asking for extra paid leave is really cheeky!

Personally I'd ask for UNPAID leave to do some voluntary work, and if they offer paid leave instead (unprovoked obviously - don't hint!), then fair enough.

SueC_2

I've never worked anywhere that has granted paid time off for employees to volunteer. Nor would I expect to.

If I want to volunteer then I do it in my own time - be that evenings, weekends, holiday from work or unpaid time off.

If I were to do it on my employer's time I wouldn't view it as volunteering, I'd see it as my employer paying me to go and work somewhere else. Why would my employer want to do that (unless as already stated he was getting good publicity from it)?

Simon11

Thanks for the advice, appart from thoughs who have only critised. Do THOUGHS who critised my post give up their time every week to help others/community, running meetings and organising weekends away?

I'm going to give it a few months, but will ask if I can work an extra few days after my contract in return for having a few days off to help at the camp.

SueC_2

Simon11 wrote: »

I'm going to give it a few months, but will ask if I can work an extra few days after my contract in return for having a few days off to help at the camp.

Good compromise. Can't see why they would have any objection, unless purely and simply they can't spare you from the office on the dates you want. Good luck.

flea72

the camp is in August, and you have two other holidays booked for the summer?

i dont know of any employer grants someone more than two weeks allocation in each quarterly period anyway, whether paid or not

i cant think that this camp has suddenly appeared out of thin air, as most take quite a bit of planning, due to expenses. perhaps you should have turned down the holidays with the family/friends, if your volunteering is so important to you

F

flea72

Simon11 wrote: »

Thanks for the advice, appart from thoughs who have only critised. Do THOUGHS who critised my post give up their time every week to help others/community, running meetings and organising weekends away?.

am i missing something here? sarcasm? inside joke? or ........?

F

lisyloo

If I were to do it on my employer's time I wouldn't view it as volunteering, I'd see it as my employer paying me to go and work somewhere else. Why would my employer want to do that (unless as already stated he was getting good publicity from it)?

I', pretty sure T-Mobile do it.
The staff get some "team working" type skill and they get good advertising in the community.
Sort of a win-win.
I think it's naive to think it's completely altruisic, neverthless if the community get something from it then I'm all for it. I'm not aware of any direct advertising.