Why should I become a member of the union?

Answer:

There are many advantages being a member of the union. Even if you have a fixed-term employment you can get advice before your salary negotiation every year, if you are a member. And just like all other employees, you have many good working benefits. They are regulated in collective agreements, negotiated by the union. We cannot work as strongly to keep these conditions without members. The time we can work as union reps is related to how many members we have.

We keep an eye on fixed-term contracts to make sure they are not misused. We can help you as a member, if you have some kind of trouble with your employment and with facts regarding the rules and regulations for different types of employment.

For example we had a dialogue with a member who got the wrong information on overtime, when employed as a research engineer. We helped this member to get double compensation when ordered to work a Sunday, instead of just getting time off the same number of hours.

We are also used to helping non-EU-citizens with questions about residence permits. In short, some of the advantages with a membership are about security and some about access to competent information.

It is also good to be a member of the unemployment fund (a-kassan). As a member you can have an income even if you are unemployed for a while. Read more at www.aea.se.

If you are a member of both the a-kassa and the union, you also have an income insurance included in the union membership (for most unions). This might give you an even higher income if unemployed. A qualification time is applied for both a-kassa and union’s income insurance.

Saco-S representatives meet the employer regularly, both at the departments and at central LiU. We get insight and influence changes and decisions made by LiU. We always work for the best of our members. Everything is not decided the way we want, but we can guarantee that many things would be worse if we had not had the chance to have a say. And, as mentioned before, we safeguard your interests and that the conditions in our agreements are applied – if not, we negotiate for the individual member.

Here you can find more information on the different unions inside Saco-S:
https://www.saco.se/en/english/our-unions/