Whatever happened to trade unions?
According to a new study released today by the New Unionism network, the public needs to reassess its belief that the union movement is in decline.
The Network, an international group which was also launched today, claims that recent data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) shows that more unions are growing than shrinking. Furthermore, the study suggests there is good reason to believe that a huge amount of union growth is going unrecorded, for economic and political
reasons.
“Manufacturing has moved en masse to less developed countries, and these are the very nations with the worst infrastructure for collecting statistics. So we are losing members on one hand, and not counting new ones on the other. What evidence we have found points to very strong union growth in these developing
countries, but almost all of it is off the radar,” said Peter Hall-Jones, a spokesman for the network.
The study concludes: “Union decline is a myth, and it is time we stopped perpetuating it. The real challenge for the union movement is not to save itself from collapse; it is to find a strategy for growth and influence at a time when the potential has never been so good.”
I was a national trade union official for 24 years and the international officer of my union for five years, so I very much welcome this assessment.