Netherlands: new general secretary of the Federation of Christian Unions wants younger members

“If we don’t do anything, the CNV will be dead and gone within ten years.”  This is the rather unusual warning issued by Jaap Smit, who took the head of the CNV on June 1st after René Paas.  His priority is to get new members and appeal to a new generation of employees.  The aim is to renew the base of the ten CNV unions, which only accounts for 300,000 members, as opposed to 1.2 million for the Federation of Netherlands Unions (FNV), the Netherlands’ key union.  And this isn’t the lesser of paradoxes, Jaap Smit pointed out: “Today, people over 55 are more active against the increase of retirement age to 67, even if doesn’t affect them, since it will only be enforced in 2020.”  In an interview to the Zeggenschap magazine, the CNV’s general secretary said that unions have to respond if they don’t want to become “a foundation with no members to influence administrators.”  The De Unie executives’ union is the only one that adopted an active policy to encourage the membership of non-affiliate groups – youth, women and “allochtonous” citizens – the name given to citizens of immigrant descent in the Netherlands.  In 2005, it created an online union division with fast and cheaper membership.  Five years later, this “Internetvakbond” (e-union) already has about 3,000 members.