The future of trade unions

Text of Brendan Barber's (TUC General Secretary) City University Vice Chancellor's Lecture

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I have already referred to the significant number of skilled professional workers who are in unions. But this is largely a public sector phenomenon. Seventy-two per cent of public sector professionals are unionised. Indeed teachers - including those at universities - are usually one of the most unionised groups in the workforce in every developed country.

Another way of looking at this is to compare service sector employment. Again unions do well in the service sectors that are predominantly public. While in the private service sectors where there are some of the worst employment conditions, union density is low.

These are not easy sectors to unionise of course. Unions are about self-organisation of workforces, and where the workforce is highly mobile, often casualised and rarely long term, union organisation is extremely challenging.

The other way in which we fail to represent the world of work is our age profile.Density has fallen sharply among young people at work. Some say this is a result in a change of attitudes among young people. The phrase 'Thatcher's children' is often heard.

But if we probe the figures a little more, they suggest a different explanation. As we can see union density among young people is relatively high in the public sector. Unions here have made a successful appeal to many young people. But the public sector employs relatively few young people. This rather suggests that what we are seeing has more to do with the workplaces where young people work, than attitudes based on age.

And of course as you will know better than me, there has been a big growth in part time service sector work for students in the last few years or so, but this employment does not reflect the work they will do as their careers develop.

So our problem is not so much that unions don't appeal to young people, but that trade unions are not well organised in the workplaces where young people are employed.

But there is a sting in that tail. Research does show that if you do not join a union when you start work, you are less likely to join in a later job, even in a union workplace. It's best to get the union habit when starting work.

Perhaps the most worrying trend for trade unions is the growing proportion of the workforce that has never been a union member.

What I would conclude from the trends I have shown you this evening is that union decline has most to do with the changing economic and industrial structure of the country, rather than workers walking away from unions.

This is also main conclusion from the author's analysis of the most comprehensive survey of the workplace undertaken periodically - the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (or WERS as us aficionados call it.)

Our problems are rooted in the decline of unionised workplaces - both their absolute number and the number of people they employ - and our failure to organise in many new workplaces. Even in sectors like manufacturing where unionisation is common, it tends to be older workplaces that are unionised - and newer ones that are not.

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