How the law treats your volunteers

Volunteers are important contributors to society, especially for non-profit organizations. From students to seniors, they’re a regular feature of events, fundraisers, and office work. And yet there’s no specific “volunteer law” in BC. If you’re a volunteer organization (as are many non-profits), or if you’re hiring unpaid volunteers, there are a few important things to consider.

What you should know

It doesn’t matter if you’re a for-profit business or a community-based non-profit: you have a responsibility to take care of the people working for you. This applies to paid staff as well as unpaid volunteers. The duties cover many areas:

Take reasonable care. An organization owes its volunteers a duty to take reasonable care. This means it must avoid foreseeable injuries to its volunteers. For example, if you’re holding a carpentry workshop that will be taught by a volunteer, you need to make sure they have the right tools and a tidy work space.
Create a safe workplace. An organization’s work space must be safe. And this extends beyond volunteers to the public in attendance. For example, at a fundraiser a volunteer might be expected to ensure a clear path to the exits, while the organization would be responsible for providing smoke alarms and fire extinguishers.
Don’t discriminate. An organization mustn’t engage in discriminatory practices. Under human rights law, it can’t treat anyone badly or unfairly because of certain parts of their identity, such as race or sex or disability. The law calls these protected characteristics. Effectively, this means you can’t exclude certain people from being able to volunteer. Taking it one step further, it could also mean that your organization’s work environment isn’t accommodating enough — for example, if you hire a volunteer in a wheelchair, the location should be accessible. Check out our discrimination coverage to learn more.

So how far does your organization have to go? It’s always a question of reasonableness in a given context. For example: is it reasonable for a 30-minute boat tour to provide life jackets to their volunteers? Yes. But would they also have to provide an hour of marine safety training before the trip? Probably not.

Beyond their legal duties to their volunteers, organizations can be held liable for what their volunteers do. This is called vicarious liability. Typically a two-part test determines this:

Was the volunteer under your direction and control? This part is pretty straightforward. If you hire volunteers and give them specific instructions of what they’re supposed to do, then they’re under your control and direction.
Was the volunteer acting within the scope of their responsibilities? If you hire a volunteer swim instructor, and someone gets injured on their watch, then yes, you’d be liable. On the other hand, if you hire a volunteer to do deliveries with your van, and they get in an accident while running a personal errand, that wouldn’t be within the scope of their responsibilities.

The second part of this test goes a bit further. If a volunteer goes out and does something outside of what the organization hired them to do, another person might assume that the organization okayed this. Think of a volunteer signing a contract with an event space. Even if the organization didn’t authorize this, a reasonable person might have thought the volunteer did have that authority. And then the organization might still be liable. The law was developed in this way to protect businesses that enter into contracts with people who hold themselves out to be representatives of an organization, but later try to back out of responsibility.

Applying these principles

Let’s walk through a few more situations to help describe an organization’s duty of care for the acts of their volunteers:

Take reasonable care. Organizations have a duty to avoid foreseeable injuries to participants. Going back to the carpentry workshop, this would mean creating a safe work environment (for example, providing safety goggles and a briefing on safety), but also ensuring that the volunteer leading the workshop is well trained.

Keep certain records confidential. Organizations must protect the records of their participants. The degree to which this applies can depend on the context — medical records or highly sensitive information should be guarded carefully. An organization should make sure that a volunteer who handles confidential records knows how to keep them safe, and what to do if there is a data breach.
Don’t let your volunteers discriminate. Organizations must ensure that their volunteers don’t discriminate against any of your participants. If a volunteer engages in discrimination, the organization can be held responsible if a human rights complaint is brought.

In some areas, the law treats volunteers differently from workers. For example, volunteers are not automatically covered by WorkSafeBC. Its workers' compensation program covers paid workers. (Though an organization can purchase optional insurance to cover injuries to volunteers.)

That said, there are situations where someone who is “volunteering” may be considered to be a worker under the law. Ask yourself the following questions:

Does your volunteer expect or receive compensation for their work? The compensation doesn't have to be money; it can be things like getting event tickets or gift certificates or even food and beverages — if the non-cash payments are of significant value.
Do you give the volunteer a set schedule and specific hours when they’re required to come and volunteer?
Do you give specific tasks to the volunteer?
Does someone at your organization directly supervise the volunteer?

The more yes answers to the above questions (especially the first one), the more likely your volunteer might be considered a worker in the eyes of the law. And in that case, your organization might be liable to pay them wages and provide them with proper notice if you no longer need their services.

Check out this webinar for more on this. Also, WorkSafeBC explains how this distinction can play out in the performing arts industry and on BC ranches, should someone be injured.

Take action

Are you the head of a small non-profit with no employees, or are you a manager at a larger organization? If you’re a small outfit, simply knowing your rights and the appropriate procedures is the baseline: bookmark this page and refer back to it as needed, like when you’re about to start a new program or plan an event. But if you’re a bigger organization, you’ll have to think about the best way to communicate these legal issues to the right staff members. That’s where policies and procedures can be helpful.

The whole organization should agree on how it handles its volunteers. Putting the rules in writing is a good idea. The policy you draft might cover a few things, like job-specific issues (screening for the right skills, clear job descriptions, orientation, training, and supervision), anti-discrimination policies (for hiring and treatment), and confidentiality (for how to safeguard personal information and other records).

Whether you’re running regular programs or just putting on a one-time event, insurance is essential. Take this example: a volunteer fails to clean up a spilled drink, and then a guest slips and falls. A good insurance policy might compensate you if that guest sues you and wins. Insurance might even pay for your legal fees. Talk to an insurance broker for more details. Buying a policy online can be tempting, but it might not be clear about what situations it covers.