Efling Union has been granted membership in the alliance of Nordic trade unions in the service sector, SUN, and will become a full-fledged member next month. The membership will be of great use in the further development of social affairs within the union, says Viðar Þorsteinsson, director of education and membership affairs at Efling.
Efling applied for and was granted observer membership to SUN last December. Vidar has attended meetings of the alliance as Efling’s observer representative since then, i.e. meeting held in Reykjavík on March 21. It was decided that the observer membership would be for six months and a decision would be made about the future afterwards.
At the beginning of this month, Sólveig Anna Jónsdóttir, chairman of Efling, sent a letter to the chairman of SUN, John Nielsen, on behalf of the union board, requesting full membership of the alliance. In her letter, Sólveig Anna explained that in the past six months, Efling had become convinced of the benefits of continuing the membership. It had proven to be very useful to exchange information and share experiences with the union´s sister organizations in the Nordic countries at the SUN level. Therefore, the board of Efling had decided to apply for full membership.
In his response letter to Efling, received last Friday, chairman John Nielsen said the SUN board had approved the application “with great pleasure”. He warmly welcomed Efling to the alliance, but Efling will officially become a member of SUN on July 1. Efling will then undertake to hold the alliance’s board meeting in Iceland next October.
Vidar is thrilled that Efling has now been accepted as a full member of SUN. “It has been very instructive to get to know the work of our sister members within SUN during the last six months while Efling was an audience member. We have received a lot of useful information from them, for example about the collective agreements of cleaners in Denmark and the methods the unions use to obtain active members. It is very gratifying that these associations have welcomed Eflinga with open arms, and it will certainly be useful to us in the development of Eflinga’s social affairs.”
SUN was founded in 1945 as an alliance of Nordic trade unions within the service sector. Among the sectors covered by SUN are cleaning and security guarding, both of which are sectors where several Efling members work. Trade unions in all the Nordic countries, outside of Greenland, are a part of the alliance, now that Efling has been admitted. There are well over a hundred thousand members of the unions that build SUN in the Nordic countries.
The mission of SUN is to strengthen the relationship and solidarity between the member associations, as well as to support the unions that are on strike, if necessary. The alliance is also a platform for sharing experiences and information about the professional activities of the trade unions in the Nordic countries.
