32 / 294
Row over Young Lawyers' Union
in England
Britain's trainee solicitors are in revolt against their
employers. An attempt by them to register as a trade
union under the new Industrial Relations Act has
brought a threat by the Law Society, representing their
employers, that it will stop employing trainees as
"articled clerks", and will stop any help it gives at the
moment to them.
The Law Society's threat is aimed at the clerks'
Associate Members Committee. This represents their
interests within the Law Society, which itself theoreti-
cally represents both solicitors and their clerks.
It also administers the training programme for
articled clerks, runs their qualifying examinations, and
contributes £2,000 a year to help with the committee
members' travelling expenses.
The clerks are also trying to negotiate with local
law societies to persuade individual employers to pay
á decent basic wage to clerks. One society settled on
a rate of between £3 and £5 a week for a beginner.
"That sort of thing is ludicrous," said Rodney King,
chairman of the Associate Members' Committee. "Al-
though, to be fair, some employers pay a reasonable
wage, the trouble is that there are far too many law
graduates, many of them married, working for £7 or
£8 a week."
The decision to register as a trade union was taken
by the 25-strong National Committee which represents
some 9,000 trainee solicitors. The first application for
registration is blocked by a constitutional point, but
the committee think they can overcome this by emend-
ing the constitution.
Last week the situation was complicated by the entry
°n the scene of Clive Jenkins of the ASTMS. The
articled clerks booked a room in the Law Society Hall
and invited him along to tell them how to go about
setting up a trade union. Brandishing a fistful of
successful actions on behalf of solicitors in industry,
Jenkins told them that setting up a trade union was
"an act of faith." This alarmed the Law Society which
suspects Jenkins' intentions.
The official view of the articled clerks' action is that
they are receiving training which will quickly take them
into the upper middle-class earning bracket, and that
until they are trained they are a net liability. The clerks
claim that by carrying out lucrative conveyancing work
for their employers they make a profit for their offices.
The threat to withdraw the Law Society's help was
given by William Brown, chairman of its Education
and Training Committee at a later meeting with the
clerks.
Dennis Gordon, secretary of Holborn Law Society,
Britain's largest local group, said : "This trade union
issue is not very real. If they set their sights too high
they will price themselves out of the market and the
future training of the legal profession in this country
will break down because solicitors will not be able to
afford clerks.
"It is true that the clerks doing conveyancing are
engaged in profitable work, but no self-respecting solici-
tor uses his clerk purely for conveyancing. They are
given a legal training and that is what costs the money.
"In my own area office rents are £6 a sq. ft. That is
enough space to stand your waste paper basket in.
Articled clerks take up more space, of course, and they
cost money for additional services. These are the sort
of factors that ought to be looked at."
(,Sunday Telegraph,
12th December 1971)
FIRST IRISH EXAMINATION
In the November 1971
Gazette
, at page 152 of volume
65, amongst candidates who passed the First Irish
Examination in September 1971 the following is the
correct name of the following candidate: Martin,
Celine Mary.
The following additional candidate should also have
been inserted : Meagher, Aideen Mary.
29