I can speak a little bit to the context and George Thomson can talk to the detail.
From our point of view, it is generally accepted that the world of work is changing, to some extent. The headlines on that are about the new gig economy and the forging of new relationships between the worker and the client—for want of a better term. There is also a blurring between work and free time. Some of us are guilty of doing that by looking at our phones every other minute to write an email when we should be relaxing. There are other examples of that, such as when company time starts to reach into the free time of an individual, which is sometimes freely given, but sometimes is not.
Over more than a decade, we have developed our idea of employability. There is a view, and cases are being made, that there is an increased responsibility on the individual to make themselves work ready. We argue that that has gone a bit too far, and that there should be more responsibility on the employer to bring on, develop and support people into employment. There is definitely a changing context.
We first wrote the charter at a time of contracting public spending—arguably, we are not out of that situation yet. The trade union movement was particularly concerned about the organised replacement of paid labour by volunteers, particularly in public service. To be fair, that was taking place at a more accelerated rate down south than it was here but we definitely saw some examples of it. There were suggestions that volunteer labour might be used during industrial disputes to replace paid labour, which we argue would be strikebreaking; as a matter of democracy, we were concerned about that as well.
That was all in the context of the trade union movement embracing volunteering as a positive thing. We are an organisation that is populated by probably 20,000 volunteers—people in Scotland who have some sort of position that makes them a named volunteer. A large number of other people are involved, too.
We want to be sure that all the positives—frankly, the beauty of volunteering—can be preserved and not contaminated because of genuine concerns from workers that their work could disappear as a consequence of the wrong application of volunteering.
George Thomson will talk about the specifics, but our particular aim in updating the charter was to move on from those earlier concerns to look at some of the new forms of work and how we might protect volunteers and workers in that context.