So after procrastinating and putting it off for years I finally decided to get off my arse and sign myself up to a Union.
I will say that in the 7+ years I've worked for my current employer I've never really had any issues, and my annual salary has increased by about £14,000 since I started working there so I guess I never really had much of a push to sign up. A few years ago however my employer was purchased by a major American Telecomms company (You can probably figure out who I work for from that) and until recently the US company seem to have more or less left us alone, however just this last week or so I found out about something that finally gave me that push I need.
Basically we were informed that the US Parent Company have a (Wholly owned) department in India which basically acts as an Employee pool, so when a department needs extra resource rather than having to hire locally in Europe or the US they can just hire a remote worker through India instead. You see where I'm going right?
Alarm bells immediately start going off in my head, I ended up getting outsourced at my last job as part of cost cutting (The last company outsourced literally their entire Operations departments. IT, HR, Facilities Management, Finance, the lot) and from all indications it seems that my current employer's UK departments are now going to be looking towards this department as a first point of call for new employees, rather than looking to hire within Europe since salaries will be so much less this way.
I immediately called this out as just being Outsourcing, but management were very fast to insist that it wasn't Outsourcing, since these people were direct employees of the company rather than working for an Outsourcing company and this is only going to be for getting additional resource rather than replacing any existing employees. As far as I'm concerned though it most definitely is Outsourcing, we just happen to own the Outsourcing company. It's 'not Outsourcing' on the thinnest of semantics really.
Due to all that though I finally decided to get myself in gear and have applied for membership of the Communication Workers Union, which seems to be the biggest Union within my sector at least. I did try searching around on our internal Intranet to see if there was any official documentation of an officially recognised Union, or Union reps, but there was absolutely nothing, which in and of itself is just more encouragement to sign up really.