Rights of Association
60 NETWORKING
Rights of Association
Joining a union?
MATT ROCK
MENTION( of) joining a union to the owners of any small business outwardly sounds a contradiction in terms- but hundreds of thousands of selfemployed people and directors of SMEs( small to medium enterprises) currently hold membership of a
TUC-affiliate.
Is this a contradiction- or common sense? Doesn’ t the desire for collective action work against those who want to use the freedom of the marketplace to improve their living standards?
Actually, both are often true as many workers who either want to set up on their own or go into partnership find that the biggest problems with succeeding are the same as when they worked for someone else: big business and dealing with government departments.
This is something that most unions have had much success in dealing with over the past 100 years. There are plenty of trades which have long traditions of practitioners being either self-employed or owning small businesses. The TUC’ s own research has shown that many unions enjoy strong membership from self-employed and small businesses in fields as diverse as lorry driving, architecture, accounting, medicine, design, journalism, the theatre, film making, writing, building trades and engineering.
So what is the attraction, compared with joining a trade association or professional body such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants?
While there are some good trade associations around, many of them are little more than talking shops or a means of giving the appearances of respectability. Membership of a professional body will usually require candidates to pass entrance exams following years of study.
There are professional societies who do offer good dispute resolution services. For example, the Institute for the Management of Information Systems has successfully supported members who were not given professional standards of office accommodation and has won extended use of company cars for IT professionals whose contracts had come to an end.
But many professional bodies do not see this as part of their remits and there are plenty of stories of management committees reluctant to take up disputes or discipline wayward members( for example, when did the Royal British Computer Society last expel a bad IT professional or an accounting body last take up a dispute between a freelancer who is owed money by or has been badly treated by one of the Top 10 firms?).
Yet these are often the sort of issues which SMEs want resolving quickly and fairly- which is also why so many SME owners still retain their union cards.
Media unions in particular have large self-employed or small Business owners in membership. This is because many of those practitioners who have decided to work for themselves or be owners of SMEs find they have the same type of problems as when they were employed by someone else.
Anyone who is either self-employed or boss of a small business can often get the quality of service they wouldn’ t ordinarily see outside a multi-national corporation. For example, the National Union of Journalists regularly recovers millions of pounds owed to members each year from major media employers. engage SPRING ISSUE 2006