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JWestland
Sorry, didn't explain myself properly. I meant being a leader by doing, not by telling (or "selling to") others what they should do. Personally, I've never had any choice of union (I'm a medic, so it's the BMA or nowt) but I still joined - and in fact they were pretty helpful to me on an individual level a number of times. I've been in France the last few years, and despite it being a massively more unionised country than the UK, there doesn't seem to be any union for doctors that I can determine. And the system for doctors is a mess! Most in the public service work ~50-60 hours a week, they still do 24 hour on call shifts and so on... These are things that are prohibited by the European Working Time Directive, implemented in the UK for doctors 10-20 years ago, but in France there's just no force that unites medics and really sticks up for their rights, instead the doctors just say "well, it's always been like that". It frustrates me enormously.