Invisible Work at War”: What is Voluntary Work’s Role in Times of War?

• In Event: Israeli Civil Society during Crises and Wars

Abstract

Israel’s civil society is known to be big in its size, considering its population, also known for providing a channel of civic participation, mainly for women and other minorities.
Also, Israel's civil society organizations positioned themselves already in the Second Lebanon War, 2006 (Katz, Gidron, et al., 2007) as a crucial actor for civilians and army functioning.


The main question this paper is aiming to answer, is: “What is the role of invisible work during war?” and brings a case study from the war in Israel started on October 7, 2023.
Volunteer work has been gaining increasing scholarly attention for four decades. Already then, Gidron (1980) noted that economists tended to ignore volunteer work. From a feminist perspective, Invisible work (Daniels, 1987) refers to actions not rewarded by monetary compensation, such as voluntary work and household responsibilities, that are mainly performed by women. This paper attempts to discuss voluntary work done during wartime.

This paper tries to encompass the role of invisible work, mainly done in the framework of nonprofit organizations and individual efforts during the war. As the State of Israel found itself in a war from October 7, 2023, a massive force of voluntary work by Israeli civil society was harnessed to encounter real-time problems in the front and in the home front, thus filling gaps in State and Army responses to the adverse situation. Examples are individual-initiated crowdfunding for military clothes and equipment, initiatives for hosting and helping the evacuated villages from the South of Israe and cooking warm meals for reserve soldiers’ units. Those initiatives are highly active nowadays and involve a mass of voluntary work, many times independent from a paid labor force such as gathering toys, collecting funds, cooking, donating clothes, driving, etc. Methodologically, besides mapping those initiatives, interviews will be conducted with female volunteers, to shed light on the voluntary work acting independently of paid labor, and without anyone coordinating the activity while being paid for it. In the interviews, I will also ask questions about civil society as the sphere that enables such vivid community activities.

The contribution to feminist theory and nonprofit management theory is by pointing out that most of the work done in times of war was not the paid one, but the voluntary one. I suggest here that the invisible, voluntary work is becoming much more visible during wartime while exposing the State’s vulnerability in providing proper responses to its citizens.

References:

Daniels, A. K. (1987). Invisible work. Social problems, 34(5), 403-415.

Gidron, B. (1980). Volunteer workers: A labour economy perspective. Labour and Society, 5(4), 355-365.

Katz, H., Elon, Y., Raviv, E., Levinson, E., Yogev, H., Yaakobi, M., & Gidron, B. (2007). Third sector organizations during the second Lebanon war: Advantages, limitations and relations with government. Civil Society and Third Sector in Israel, 1(1), 29-30.

Author

• Inbar Livnat