The Meanings of Voluntary Work in a Public Hospital Facing the Covid-19 Crisis Case Study at the Liège Hospital

The Covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected work regulations and people’s experience at work. This crisis context has opened or widened spaces for experimentations, based on legal frameworks which have also been challenged. Through this communication, we wanted to contribute to the understanding of these processes through a case study on the mobilization of volunteer status within the Public Hospital of Liège (Belgium), from October 2020 to January 2021. With the recrudescence of Covid-19 infections, this hospital has had to deal with an increase in needs and a decrease in available staff. Faced with this situation, a call for volunteers was launched to support the hospital’s "support" services. Just over 500 people responded to this call, resulting in the involvement of 70 volunteer workers in the end. Volunteer status in Belgium is a status on the fringes of employment, partially aligned with labour law. It covers activities undertaken a priori without obligation and unpaid, within non-profit organizations. Although volunteering is generally perceived as being outside the field of work, some recent analyses of the organizational and individual uses of volunteering suggest to integrate it into the sphere of work. Many of the activities covered by volunteer status involve an articulation of meanings historically associated with work and, specifically, a combination of instrumental and expressive dimensions. Our contribution proposed on the one hand to analyse the way in which the status of volunteer has been mobilized by the Liège Hospital (position and standards associated with volunteering in the work organization) and the processes that led to this experimentation. On the other hand, the aim was to understand the work experience of volunteers (with a typology of the logics of involvement). To this end, our contribution is based on interviews with the hospital managers and volunteer workers (n=25), as well as on some participant observation sessions and documentary analysis. This experimentation, temporary in principle, presents the features of a de-regulation of work in terms of remuneration and social protection (as these volunteers take on potentially the role of the regular, paid workforce), with an increase in autonomy and self-realization at work (from the perspective of the volunteers here, compare to the absence of work or to a previous job). It questions the limits of existing legal frameworks and protection, the resilience of our care institutions through the crisis (after years of structural budget cuts), and the logics of action of volunteers. Beyond the conjuncture of the Covid-19 crisis, we argue that the social uses of volunteering constitute a fertile object of research to understand the current dynamics at play in the world of work. We hypothesize that the social uses of volunteering are closely linked both to models of work organization, marked by forms of instrumentalization based on growing expressive aspirations, as well as to current expectations about work, particularly expressive ones.