My mother is a member of a church that some people often call a cult that the creators of South Park made a musical about. I’m not here to debate anything about the religion itself, I have plenty of issues but also see the happiness it brings to people.
One of the things the church does is call people to “volunteer” positions. These often are Sunday school teachers or other church related positions but they also recently started calling people as building cleaners instead of paying a cleaning staff. The position my mother is serving in is much worse than that. Two years ago my mother received a calling for what is basically a document processor. She takes scans of historic government documents and manually keys in the information.
What does a church need with government records?
Good question! It’s not actually for the church but for a for-profit company owned by the church. Not only is she helping the company earn money, which the church has billions of, but she also has a time card, is required to get 20 hours of time in each week and with her most recent project required to answer email questions in a timely manner. This new position she took is also replacing a paid worker who retired!
All of this would be fine if she was well off in her retirement but she’s living off government subsidies while the same church also takes 10% of the money she’s gets from SS. I’ve talked to her numerous times about it and saying she should just get a job instead.