ABSTRACT
The continued strength and influence of trade unions depends upon their ability to attract young workers into membership and activism. If unions are to halt a spiral of decline – where falling membership erodes union credibility and, in turn, weakens the case for joining – then this means organising today’s school leavers in greater numbers than their older workmates. With very few exceptions, this is the challenge in industrialised countries worldwide and, in response to this crisis, unions have gone through an period of sustained introspection and innovation (Hodder and Kretsos, 2015). So, whilst unions are seemingly peripheral to the lives of many young people, the young are increasingly central to union revival. The employment open to young people is disproportionately low paid and insecure: grievances that might be expected to prompt membership. This has not happened and the reasons for this are the starting point for this chapter. The question addressed here is: to what extent are trade unions capable of recruiting and representing young workers? It now seems self-evident that unions should prioritise attracting new young members, yet just 30 years ago such a focus on young workers would have been unusual. The question becomes an urgent one at a time when prospects for decent work, decent pay and employment security seem particularly bleak for current school-leavers. Rising unemployment in many parts of the world is accompanied by the dismantling of employment protections in the name of labour market ‘flexibility’ and ‘austerity’ cuts in funding that often disproportionately affect the young. It can be argued that the inter-generational transmission of opportunity has been disrupted. In the absence of effective resistance to such growing age-related inequality, the danger is of generational warfare as young and old compete for jobs and funding: a counterproductive response, since the worsening of conditions for any age group inevitably affects the young in their turn. After setting out the extent of the problem, this chapter will contrast competing ideas on the causes and consequences of decline and then go on to discuss proposed responses. It will ask the following questions. Why are young workers less likely to be members of trade unions? Does this really matter? And what, if anything, can trade unions do about it? The discussion here will
centre on the UK, but it is important first to consider the broader picture and the reasons why this debate has been more prominent in some countries than others. After all, union decline is an almost universal phenomenon and while it has been dramatic in the UK, it has been catastrophic in many other countries. The result is that the young are increasingly not represented in the workplace, or covered by collective bargaining. The time series of union decline in the UK conventionally takes 1979 as the starting point. This marks the point when a combination of unemployment, the dismantling of highly unionised industries and restrictive labour law halted decades of post-war growth. In a similar way, changing fortunes for unions in other countries have their watershed years when the rules of the game changed. Membership has fallen farthest and fastest in the economies of the former Soviet bloc, where the taint of party control has had a lasting legacy into the twenty-first century. Rather than providing an independent voice for workers in confronting the interests of the state as employer, the prescribed role for unions in state-socialist countries was as a ‘transmission belt’ for management – little more than an arm of workplace HR management. Post-1989, with the end of compulsory membership, union density plummeted and has not recovered. Even in Poland, where Solidarnos´c´ was founded in 1980 precisely to reject this quiescent role, membership density now stands at about 10 per cent (Eurofound, 2013) and young people’s attitudes are still coloured by this earlier history and by union implication in subsequent market reform (Czarzasty et al., 2014). In western European countries trajectories of decline differ, but they also feature a reliance on state-sponsored roles. Post-war social democracy gave unions both a political and a bureaucratic role in the welfare state, particularly in what became known as the ‘Ghent’ system. Similarly, European ‘social partnership’, epitomised by the Netherlands and Denmark, involved unions gaining a degree of influence in broader labour market policy, but to a large extent relinquishing any claims to contest management prerogative at the workplace. ‘Flexicurity’ – a product of this partnership approach – trades job protection for labour market support designed to boost employment. In favourable political conditions this approach brought dividends and it was possible to argue that union influence need not be based on membership density alone (Bryson et al., 2011); other forms of influence and other forms of activism are possible. But without such a critical mass, and in a more hostile climate, unions have struggled to appear credible or relevant. In the UK, whilst the steep decline of the 1980s and 1990s has steadied, prospects of reversing it seem distant. Membership density (essentially the proportion of union members to potential members) was just 25 per cent in 2014, compared with 32.4 per cent in 1995 (BIS, 2014). In the case of young workers the trend has been more marked: 11 per cent of employees in the 20-24 age group were members in 2014, compared with 19.3 per cent in 1995. This drop is far bigger than can be attributed to the ageing of the workforce in highly unionised sectors. Although rates of decline have changed, it is notable that the rank order of membership density between countries has remained fairly stable (Bryson et al., 2011). A period of economic disruption has set the path for subsequent generations. What is less clear is how this has affected young workers themselves. Should they be seen as potential members who are waiting for unions to take them seriously? Or are today’s young more individualistic and less amenable to trade unionism?
