INTRODUCTION

Recent years have been tough for the trade unions. Headline after headline has proclaimed their imminent demise, their irrelevance to changing occupational and industrial structures and to supposedly transformed ideologies. They have come under political onslaught. Given all of this, they have survived remarkably well.

The emerging evidence of a stabilisation in their position, at least in numerical terms, itself says something about the causes of the problems. Trade union membership has not declined because of some autonomous ideological shift away from unionism, or more generally away from collectivism and towards individualism (Gallie, 1987). On the contrary, there is some evidence that those who remain in trade unions today are more consciously trade unionist than previously. Given the political climate, being a trade union member is possibly more of a political statement than it was when, in the then major sectors of the economy, taking up trade union membership was almost a reflex action.

The bulk of the recent decline in trade union membership has resulted from a straightforward loss of jobs, a process concentrated in the more unionised sectors, and from people going out of union membership when moving jobs to sectors where unions have been less successful in gaining an organisational foothold (Gallie, 1987). These two processes are associated mainly with the massive recession in the early eighties and with very long term structural changes in the economy, particularly changes in the labour process and in the occupational structure of the workforce. To these problems can be added an extraordinarily hostile government bent on attack. With hindsight, the first factor (the recession) seems to have been the cause of all the headlines, but it will probably be the other two phenomena (the long-term ‘structural changes’ and the political onslaught) which ultimately will be seen to have posed the bigger challenges. We shall look at these in the sections which follow.

Table 7.1 shows the clear shift from growth to decline in total membership of all unions between the 1970s and 1980s. This has not been reversed. But the real collapse took place in the recession years between 1980 and 1983, which fits at aggregate level with Gallie’s findings.