ABSTRACT
Young workers are much less likely to be unionized than older workers in Great Britain. In 2001, the Labour Force Survey (for the UK) reported that 16 per cent of employees aged up to 29 years were union members compared to 34 per cent of workers aged 30 years and older (see Table 3.1). From the 1980s and through the 1990s the proportion of workers who were in unions fell more rapidly among younger workers than among older workers. As a result the young worker share of union membership dropped to extraordinarily low levels. Data from the MORI Social Research Institute’s aggregate Omnibus survey (which involves about 65,000 interviews per year and, like all the data in this chapter except the Labour Force survey is for Great Britain) shows that in 1998 just 7 per cent of union members were aged 18-24 whereas a decade earlier 14 per
cent of all union members were in this age group (Mori, 2000). While the number of workers that join unions typically rises with age, membership among British young persons dropped to sufficiently low levels to constitute a serious problem for the future of unions.
