Solidarity starts Growth Fund for members and their children

The Executive Board of Solidarity decided in principle to launch a special Growth Fund to substantially expand the trade union’s benefits and services. The aim of the Growth Fund is to expand projects such as Sol-Tech and the Helping Hand’s bursary fund, and to introduce a range of additional services and benefits for members.

The president of the trade union, Mr Steve Scott, said that although Sol-Tech and the Helping Hand’s bursary fund are currently successful, they are still too small to meet the needs of our members. Sol-Tech currently trains only 200 students while we had more than a thousand applications, and last year the Helping Hand provided bursaries of R1,4 million to 200 children of members, while we had six times that number of applications. “We felt that we had to tackle this on a much larger scale to give real hope to our people for the future”, Scott said.

The Executive Board’s in principle decision arises from countrywide meetings where the Growth Fund was introduced to union representatives and met with overwhelming acceptance. The proposal entails that Solidarity does not implement the normal membership fee increase this year, but that a contribution of R10 per month be levied to start the Growth Fund. This money will be deposited into a special fund, and the trade union will not have an increase for operational costs this year. This in principle decision will be discussed further with representatives and members to get as many inputs as possible before the final decision is made during the next Executive Board meeting on 11 September. The aim of the Growth Fund is not only be expand training countrywide, but also all the other services such as the Helping Hand, our personnel agencies and other benefits such as the trade union’s affordable medical aid and pension fund. A large number of other benefits, including a holiday club, are also investigated for members.

Technical college

The Growth Fund will enable the trade union to expand Sol-Tech to a fully-fledged Technical College that can train a thousand artisans and learners per annum. For this purpose a building has already been identified in Andeon, Pretoria. Agreements will be entered into with colleges in other regions of the country to enable members’ children to study close to home. Negotiations in this regard have already started. Similarly the bursary fund of the Helping Hand for 2009 will be almost trebled to assist more members with bursaries for their children. These bursaries will be made available for Sol-Tech and other training institutions such as universities.

Oxbridge, the college for non-technical training in which Solidarity has acquired a large share at the start of the year, will also be expanded to afford trade union members and their children training opportunities. Solidarity has also concluded an agreement with Damelin to make more than 500 bursaries available to our members to improve their training. “The aim of all these training initiatives is give all our members and their children who wish to study the opportunity to do so”, Mr Flip Buys, Chief Executive Officer of the trade union said. In this way we could afford our members the opportunity to grow, we could contribute to economic growth and simultaneously do our part to find solutions to the skills shortage in the country.

Competitive advantage

The competitive advantage of Solidarity membership is that our members now get the opportunity to be in the forefront of training in their field of expertise. This will contribute to their job security and also improve their chances for promotion.