One-in-four branches refuse to take on Chambers Ireland re-branding
The nationwide re-branding of Chambers Ireland, formally known as Chamber of Commerce Ireland (CCI) started yesterday.
This is the first non-governmental chamber network in the world to take on a unitary brand and, as of yet, just 45 of Chambers Ireland’s 59 accredited members have agreed to take on the common identity and logo.
According to Chambers Ireland, however, it is expected that in time every chamber will agree to take on the new identity.
Affiliated members who have agreed to the re-branding will now be known, for example, as Letterkenny Chamber, Cork Chamber and Limerick Chamber.
Chambers Ireland represent over 12,000 businesses in Ireland.
In a ceremony to mark the launch in Cork, Chamber president Roger Flack described the new brand launch as a significant day in the history of Cork Chamber of Commerce.
“The new brand has been designed to represent the depth and diversity of the chamber and to underline our core values as a networking organisation that brings people together to achieve more for their business,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chambers Ireland president Robin O’Sullivan expressed concern about the shift in social partnership to an increasingly binding level of implementation that is limiting Irish companies’ options for maintaining competitiveness.
“As long as tripartite negotiations set the background for individual enterprise level agreements between owner managers and their largely non-unionised workers, most businesses were content to allow IBEC and ICTU to define the context of this process,” he said.
But Mr O’Sullivan went on to say that, where these negotiations produce legally-binding arrangements that constrain workers and management from freely agreeing their own working relationships, taking local circumstances into account, then that laissez-faire attitude could not be sustained in the face of a growing democratic deficit.
