New legislation gives better protection for voluntary workers
Saturday, January 24, 2015 @ 10:41 PM
A NEW law regulating voluntary work has been approved in Parliament and will provide extra protection and a helpful legal framework for charitable organisations.
An estimated six million people in Spain are volunteers and include hundreds of thousands of northern European expatriates, among whom are a high number of British nationals.
They range from home nursing and hospital transport services through to animal rescue, supplying and raising money for food and other basics for those in poverty, helping at children's homes, running charity shops, and encompass wider national and international organisations such as the Red Cross, Oxfam and Cáritas.
This is the first time legislation covering such work has been updated in over 20 years, and during that time volunteers have dramatically increased in number and awareness has rocketed.
Problems of many years or decades ago, such as charity shops or home nursing headquarters being visited by the work inspectors demanding to see the unpaid staff's social security details, or checked out to ensure they were not a front for money-laundering are now a distant memory and charities and volunteer associations are a huge part of the fabric of modern society.
In fact, they have become crucial, with soup kitchens, Cáritas, the Red Cross and smaller, similar outfits struggling to keep up with demand for food parcels and donations of clothing.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com