ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty years, trade unions in Britain, Canada and the USA – three countries sharing similar labour market institutional frameworks – have had a difficult time maintaining, let alone advancing, membership rates (Figure 5.1). There are two principle reasons for this. First, unions have been unable to attract new members, as is evidenced by the growing proportion of all employees who have never been members (see Chapter 2). Indeed, union density decline in Britain can be almost entirely explained by
Box 5.1 The case of never-membership in Britain
• The decline in union density since the early 1980s is almost wholly accounted for by the rise in never-membership (see Figure 5.2). Between 1983 and 2001, union density fell from 49 to 31 per cent. Ex-membership remained virtually static, but the rate of never-membership rose from 28 per cent to 48 per cent.
