The corruption of "volunteering"

When I read headlines like this I get momentarily confused,

Volunteers face funding cuts

My understanding of a volunteer as someone who provides a service without paid recompense is obviously incorrect.

Further, providing "volunteer" services becomes increasingly costly. It must, because "volunteers" who once relied on church donations now rely on taxation via government funding.

This particular group get funding from Work and Income. To provide work-training courses. In this respect they are merely an extension of state welfare. That's OK if they are as successful as they claim to be. But it remains a misnomer to label activities that are paid for as "volunteering". There may be an element of unpaid work involved although I doubt that people running a full-time course would be unpaid.

We even have a "Minister for the Community and Voluntry Sector" (not my spelling mistake). Why?

Because there are over 105,000 paid staff in the "voluntary" sector which receives a good part of its funding from government. We should probably rightly call many of these people 'public servants'. Hence one can better grasp why they are facing cuts.