Join the club

Napoleon described britain as a "nation of shopkeepers"* but I beg to differ: Britain is a nation of club members. Most of us join clubs of one sort or another and a quick internet search reveals that there are around 1900 athletics clubs in the UK, 750 clubs for classic car enthusiasts, and 120 for naturists. I'm not sure how much overlap there is between these three memberships, but you get my drift.

Even in the world of work, we still join clubs, whether in the form of a trade union or professional body (there are some 130,000 members of the IEE). Clubs exist on a higher level still, such as Nato and the EU, and the UK is a member of these too (better in than out).

Yet despite this great desire to belong to something, we Brits can appear remarkably apathetic at times. A statistic that is frequently quoted is that the turnout for the 2001 general election was only 59.4% , though it would be a fairly safe bet to say that 99% of the electorate has, at some point, complained about the state of the health service, education, transport, crime, the economy or foreign policy.

Returning to the subject of work - and engineering/industry, more specifically - companies are often quick to attack standards and legislation. Sometimes this is because they are seen as additional bureaucracy that does little to improve health, safety, quality, competition or performance, but there are also occasions when the underlying principles are genuinely contentious. Once again, there are those companies that grumble and those that seek to influence the appropriate standards committees, or who work with their trade body to lobby the politicians before legislation is passed.

European suppliers of assembly and handling technology represent an estimated annual turnover of around euro12 billion - and the market is growing. Until recently, this industry had no unified trade body to represent it on a European level. In March 2000, however, the European Factory Automation Committee (EFAC) was founded, with six members representing suppliers in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany (a representative of Finland has since joined too). Being an 'association of associations', EFAC has no direct member companies; rather, the national organisations who are EFAC members represent the interests of their respective member companies.

EFAC's main aims are to collect market and benchmarking data, provide a platform for networking and communication, promote trade fairs, and represent the interests of the industry at a European level. One of the key activities is a biennial conference, the most recent of which was held in January at Davos, Switzerland.

Around 60 senior executives attended from 11 countries and the conference facilitated in-depth discussions of the major trends and challenges facing the industry. Various topics were covered such as global location decisions for assembly operations, the market potential for micro assembly, strategies for entering foreign markets, future demands of the automotive industry, and the current state of the automation industry in the USA.

All of this is of interest and importance to UK factory automation suppliers, yet there is no UK member of EFAC. Will this be another case of us Brits being apathetic and then complaining when somebody else makes a decision that adversely affects us? For a nation of club members, it is somewhat surprising that we are not represented within EFAC (unless there are unreported negotiations already underway). Perhaps grass-roots engineers should be lobbying to get the UK to join this club - after all, it's better to be in than out.