Trade Unions in The United Kingdom

Trade unions are groups of workers from normally similar industries that use their monopolistic hold on the supply of labour to influence companies. Inside a company, a single worker is likely to have quite a small influence over the company. If the worker loses their job after protesting on their own, the effect of the loss of their job is much larger to them than the loss of the worker to the company. However, if the workers group together then the loss of a major proportion of the workforce is actually quite a big deal to the company (especially if they’re trained) so the company may actually sit up and listen to them.

Established in the 1860s, the TUC is an umbrella organisation that 58 trade unions belong to. The TUC helps the unions draw up common policies/avoid clashes, lobbies the Government to implement policies that will benefit people at work, represents working people on public bodies & represents British trade unions abroad such as on the EU. The policy making of the TUC is done at the annual “Congress”, which meets for four days each September. Each affiliated union can send delegates to Congress — the larger the union, the more it can send. At Congress, “motions” (resolutions for debate) are proposed and discussed.

For many years trade union membership levels increased, peaking in the late 70s at 13+ million. However, after the rise of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, trade union membership started to decrease.

Part of this decline was due to the union legislation that Thatcher had passed in response to the Winter of Discontent in 1978-9 (which saw widespread strikes by trade unions affecting most public services). This legislation limited the power of the unions, for example, procedures were introduced to ensure that any industrial action could only legally occur after a cooling off period and if a majority of members vote in favour.

Another factor is the decline in the manufacturing sector in the UK. Union activity is often easier to organise in factories where there are large numbers of people on one site compared to, say, retailing where in any one store they may be relatively few staff which makes organising meetings of a firm’s employees more difficult.

Finally, there are greater attempts by management to deal with employees on an individual basis and to move away from “collective bargaining” (when management bargain with trade union representatives who are negotiating on behalf of large groups of staff).

Since 1995 levels have stayed pretty constant at between 7 & 8 million members.

Trade Unions were traditionally centred around the North East, with the emphasis being based in factories & mines where we’ve seen that it’s easier to organise a strike (everyone is together in one place); they’re also trained and important to society. For example, if the miners strike than Britain has almost no electricity whereas if say, Tesco checkout workers went on strike then we could go and shop somewhere else; they could easily be fired and replaced by just about anyone as it’s not a hugely skilled job.

Nowadays, with the manufacturing industry in Britain all but gone, the industry with the highest proportion of workers belonging to a union is education, 53.6% as of 2009, closely followed by “public administration & defence” at 52.2%. The industry with the lowest proportion of workers in a union is in Hotel & Restaurant workers, at a mere 3.9%. However, public sector professionals have some serious constraints on activism despite their union membership. The unions they belong to are fragmented, with both health and education sectors being represented by several different unions.

Interestingly, the average hourly wage for a union member (£13.60) is still 15.3% higher than that of a non-union member(£11.80). Only 14.5% of private sector workers are in unions while over 54.9% of public sector workers are (26.1% overall). As age increases, the proportion of those belonging to a union also increases; from a mere 8.5% of employed 16-24s to 33.2% of 50+ year olds. As for gender, a higher proportion of women (27.9%) belong to a union than men (24.3%).