"Salary: N/A" - devaluing work at the BFI?

This post is a little moan from my own professional world, but I think it has some wider implications for all sorts of organisations and reflects the status of cultural workers in the UK.

The British Film Institute has recently advertised for "Database Volunteers" - unpaid workers, "Salary: N/A," to add and correct data on the BFI's Film and TV Database .

This comes hot on the heels of the Institute's call for "postgraduate researchers who, as part of their studies, can view and catalogue holdings of important Channel 4 programmes held in the bfi National Film and Television Archive."There is an obvious benefit to all concerned for organisations to provide volunteer and internship opportunities, much experience and many contacts can be obtained by volunteers and interns - all of which will help them in their future careers. Collaboration with academic institutions, their staff and researchers can add value to an organisation's records and information that would otherwise be missed. However, should an organisation depend on unpaid labour to do some of its core work (to create and maintain accurate records)?

Using unpaid labour creates a situation where the volunteers subsidise the work of an organisation by taking on the cost of the work they do. They meet those real costs in the form of lost income, and having to arrange their lives to allow this "free" work to take place. The costs do not go away, they are merely outsourced.

Funding bodies, stakeholders and others, almost always ignore the contribution of unpaid workers when mapping the cost of running anorganisation against the results it achieves. Therefore the more an organisation uses unpaid labour the more necessary unpaid labour becomes to its existence. Attempts to obtain more funds to do the same work when volunteers leave are not generally met with success.

For those professionals doing the same or similar work in salaried positions, the use of unpaid labour can only lead to wage suppression and a reduction in both their professional standing and their perceived value to an organisation.

Publicly funded cultural organisations like the British Film Institute, and the many others in the UK working in a much more parlous situation must out of necessity try to achieve their aims against a background of limited funds. Imaginative solutions are always being called for, and all options must be considered.

But is this the way forward?