The future of trade unions

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

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But a world where people at work did not have the right to call on a union, or where industrial action was banned, would be more unequal, more unfair, less free and less democratic.

To adapt the cliche you can argue that collective bargaining is the least worst system of industrial relations we have.

But while these are all strong, principled arguments for trade unionism, they are little use unless we apply them practically and convince others to join our ranks or treat us as partners.

So what has happened to trade unionism since the dark days of the 1980s?

In short the figures show that we have halted our decline, but have yet to secure a real advance. Given the forces we have had to overcome simply standing still represents a heroic effort, yet I know that this is not enough. But let us look at the figures in more detail before developing the argument.

In recent years Union density has stopped falling and is now relatively stable. And as total employment has increased in recent years, we have indeed seen an increase in union membership in some years.

But it's more interesting than that when you delve below the bold figures.

You will recall that one of the factors I gave for the decline in trade unionism was the fall in traditional large workplaces in manufacturing and heavy industry. This is shown in the figures for the gender balance.

The decline in density has mainly been among men. Women's density has fallen only slightly over the whole period under review. The result is that you can no longer say the grassroots of the trade union membership is overwhelmingly male. We organise almost the same proportion of men and women at work.

I concede straightaway that this change in gender balance is not always reflected in the movement's leadership, though we have done a little better at the TUC with two out of three of our top team now women.

The same kind of trend is true if you look at working status. While perhaps not surprisingly, we are less good at organising part time workers than full time workers, we have maintained our position among part timers.

Ethnicity is far more complex, and different groups have rather different rates of union membership, but the pattern is again largely the same - holding on to ethnic minority density rather better than the working population as a whole.

But in general we can say that when it comes to gender, working status and ethnicity trade union membership now looks rather like the rest of the workforce. The trends in skill levels and social class are similar.

The view of trade unions as manual, blue-collar male workers is now very out of date. Union members are as likely to be professional white-collar workers. But there are two ways in which union membership differs sharply from the workforce as a whole, and they go to the heart of the challenges facing trade unionism in Britain today.

First we are far stronger in the public sector than in the private sector.Three out of every five workers in the public sector are members of unions, while only one in five of private sector employees are in unions.

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