That's the bit I dont get. Unless theres something really in it for them.
As someone who has barely left the house for the past three months, I would be more than happy to volunteer a few hours a week simply for an excuse to get out and do something useful. Any form of volunteering attracts a few more 'interesting' types, but then there's plenty of them getting paid too.
My experience of volunteering is that it primarily undermines the value of paid work. As we see with libraries, organisations won't pay a wage if someone will work for free. Volunteer librarians are lovely, but they are the reason why councils made their paid librarians redundant.
And who is going to pay for all these extra paid staff? I used to volunteer - as I know at least one other person on here still does - for a very large youth organisation. One year, our head office worked out that if all of our volunteers were paid the minimum wage for the hours they gave, it would amount to a bill in the hundreds of millions of pounds a year. You can just as easily argue that they were taking paid employment away from council-funded youth workers. They weren't, of course, because the reality is that, without volunteers, those services would have not existed for a lack of funding.
In the context of the railway, I fail to see the difference between these volunteers on SWR and local 'friends' groups, for example. Picking one purely because it's local to me, Friends of Hindley Station do an amazing job maintaining their local station, and make it a delight to use. Without the help of those volunteers, does anyone really believe that any TOC would invest the time and resources needed to maintain stations to the same standard? Of course they wouldn't.
Most importantly, though, as
@Bald Rick and others have said already, these are far from normal times, and demand that we all - the RMT included - do our bit. Under normal circumstances, they might have a point - might, I would still disagree - but right now, if a referrendum were held to ban unions, the actions of the RMT would make me think twice before voting against it.