Pity the poor chuggers – they do an impossible job in terrible conditions | Zoe Williams

The modern practice of chugging – a contraction of “charity” and “mugging”, where cheerful young people come up to you in the street and ask you if you’ve ever really thought about what life would be like without clean water – is mostly discussed for its nuisance to the chuggee.

I never even considered the other side of the equation until my niece got fired, after a month, from chugging for a charity I won’t name – not because I don’t think they’re bad, just because I think it would be unfair, as this is probably common across the sector.

She was, in fact, the last person in her trainee group of five to get fired, so that’s a win; one guy got axed during the actual training session. The sword of dismissal hangs over them hour by hour, as their group chat pings with messages from invisible bosses: “One more by lunchtime, come on guys, one more by break … if Matt [not his real name, but I’ll bet there’s a Matt suffering this somewhere] doesn’t get one by COP, he can hand in his uniform.”

All the emphasis is on getting people to sign up for a direct debit, but nobody wants to do that, because no one has any money. It doesn’t seem to make any difference whether the chugger has two years’ experience or a day and a half – everyone’s numbers hover between zero new sign-ups and, on an incredibly chancy, fair-wind day, three. All the while, the WhatsApp drumbeat: “Come on, guys, we are definitely looking for higher numbers.”

The great irony is, many of these charities exist explicitly to serve young people in poverty in the UK, while paying young people in the UK the minimum wage, with not so much job insecurity as anti-security, and much hectoring over conditions the charity bureaucrats surely know are outside the chugger’s control. As my niece exited, five fresh people had already been brought in. Maybe they were the genius hires that could make the model work, but that was three weeks ago. More likely they’ve already been sacrificed and replaced, to maintain the fiction that what must be wafer-thin margins, between the scant wages and the hen’s teeth direct debits, are creating a better society.