Welcome to Volunteerland: How Volunteering Became Unpaid Work and a Subject of Labor Statistics

This article argues that the availability of statistical information on volunteering resulted froma variety of efforts to make previously obscured contributions to countries’ wealth and well-being visible as productive activities. Since the late 1960s, economists from the Global Southand feminists criticized international economic standards for their Western and male bias. Thesediscontents led to the introduction of unpaid work as a new category of international laborstatistics and umbrella term for very diverse activities, such as subsistence farming, housework,caring, and volunteering. This was the beginning of an epistemic revolution in data collectionwith far-reaching consequences. It changed the semantics of the concept of labor and en-hanced the visibility of women’s and volunteers’ contributions to societies’ well-being. But datacollection also made volunteering more susceptible to political management and economicexploitation, and its classification under the general category unpaid work tended to blur thedistinction between voluntary and involuntary activities.