The AA On Strike
The news that staff at the AA will be conducting a strike ballot will come as a surprise. After all, the AA is thought of as one of the great philanthropic organisations; a helpful, friendly team of people always willing to solve whatever technical problem our vehicles may throw at us, irrespective of any personal inconvenience. Of course the AA is no longer really like that, but that is how we perceive it, and perceptions are important.
The AA’s image (and that of the RAC) is of course a throwback to the time when it was a members’ club. We paid to join and we reaped privileges in the form of breakdown assistance, travel information etc., whenever we needed them. But these days the AA belongs to a company called Acromas, who also own Saga, and it is of course the shift from social enterprise to commercial entity that has led to industrial tensions between staff and management, in this case over pensions.
This contains a sobering lesson for social entrepreneurs today. Those who are building a better world by setting up not-for-profit companies to do good, often having significant impact on the fields of education, sustainability and poverty. Social entrepreneurism is having something of a revival these days, but it is not new; Cadbury, although not technically a social enterprise was founded on ethical principles in an Victorian manifestation of the philanthropic ethos.
But successful social enterprises, whether clubs like the RAC or AA, or trading companies like those in the Fairtrade network, become commercially attractive to investors and risk ending up as profit making entities paying little more than lip service to their founding principles, indeed often using those principles as little more than a branding tool.
The AA’s story shows how easy it is for social enterprises to turn into the very thing they were reacting against. Social entrepreneurs beware.
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Tags: AA, Industrial Relations, Social Enterprise
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