Wow! What a year 2024 has been for Aegis the Union!
So many changes and developments and positive messages to reflect on.
Fiona Steele, Deputy General Secretary, retired on 1 May this year after 18 years exemplary service, helping to shape and drive Aegis forward from it’s staff association days to become a strong, influential independent trade union that we are today.
Ania Lomax took over from Fiona as Deputy General Secretary and Steve Crotty joined us from Yorkshire Building Society rep community to replace Ania.
I’m delighted to say that both Ania and Steve have hit the ground running and are relishing their new roles.
We have also trained and developed twenty new reps this summer, many of which are already supporting and representing our members in disciplinary and grievances.
We have raised motions at the TUC, Scottish TUC and LGBT+ conferences about Neurodiversity in the workplace, AI legislation and regulation and Ensuring Labour’s National Wealth Fund goes to Unionised employers.
All our motions were unanimously support by all the other unions and the added bonus was that Ania and Ricky were first time conference speakers this year.
Our full time officers and our reps have been extremely busy, not only helping and supporting our members, but securing new members to Aegis.
This year, although we have seen many redundancies across all three divisions, we have increased our membership by over five hundred, which is an amazing feat in the current climate. This also makes our voice stronger with the employers where we are recognised.
After listening to reps and members for many years we finally built a new website this year and started our quarterly newsletters. I hope you agree it looks much better?
I’m really looking forward to next year and I’m confident that we can improve again on our three main strategic priorities, which are to Grow our Membership, Empower our Reps and Improve our Digital Offering.
Finally, as we announced last week, due to rising costs since we last raised our
Subs back in 2019, we will be putting our subs up.
We’ve worked hard over the past 6 years to prevent putting up our subscriptions, whilst shouldering the increase in costs for the services we provide such as legal costs and insurance increases.
However, due to these financial pressures, we plan to increase your membership subscriptions to £8.00 a month from July 2025.
We are proud to offer excellent value for money compared to our competitors, with some of the benefits of being an Aegis member below;
- Negotiate some of the best pay awards in the industry.
- Negotiate and retain some of the best terms and conditions of employment in the industry
- Access to qualified and experienced local reps
- Free and discounted legal advice on a range of issues
- Engage in external lobbying through a variety of groups to promote and protect the interests our members in the finance sector
- Offer discount schemes with national providers like Hotpoint, Benchmark Travel and Health & Fitness providers.
We believe that the increase to £8.00 (£1.50 extra a month) strikes the right balance between maintaining our financial sustainability and ensuring membership remains affordable.
Brian Linn
General Secretary
Aegis the union
27 January 2025
