Introduction

In exploring the crisis of contemporary work, it is essential to examine the experiences and activities of the trade unions. There is a widespread understanding that unions, as collective organizations of workers, play a crucial part in ensuring that workers are well treated and have their interests represented effectively at work. Trade unions use their bargaining power to leverage pressure on employers to treat workers fairly, pay them appropriately and provide them with decent working conditions. During 2022–23, the popularity of Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union in the UK, was based on his success in articulating the interests of the RMT's members in the media, especially their demands for higher pay and to maintain properly staffed train services and stations, amid a series of strikes on the railways.

Many of the profound problems workers currently experience – extensive insecurity and precarity (see Chapter 3), for example, and commodification pressures (see Chapter 4) – would not have become so acute if the trade unions had been stronger in recent years. Powerful trade unions capable of organizing and mobilizing workers to ensure their rights and protections are defended, and to advance them where necessary, clearly matter (Livingston, 2021). In the hospitality sector, for example, an industry marked by low pay and poor conditions, trade unions have helped workers benefit from higher pay (Papadopolous and Ioannou, 2023).

In general, though, since the 1980s trade unions have themselves been in crisis. This chapter begins by explaining how the crisis of trade unionism, one that is particularly manifest in reduced union membership, was a product of neoliberalization before examining how the unions have sought to respond to the crisis by looking to revitalize themselves. After 2020, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provided unions with opportunities to build back stronger. Moreover, one key way the trade unions have sought to demonstrate their relevance is by engaging with environmental issues and responding to the climate crisis. Unions are playing a key role in facilitating a ‘just transition’ to a net- zero world by ensuring that workers’ interests are represented in the process of change, even though this has generated some notable tensions and challenges.