ABSTRACT
In the heyday of trade unions in the late 1970s before Mrs Thatcher was elected, over half of all employees were union members and more than 70 per cent of workers had their pay and conditions set by collective bargaining. Those figures have been whittled away to present day equivalents of 29 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. In the first part of this chapter, we analyse the various factors associated with the decline of trade unions in Britain in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The second part then goes on to describe what the likely fortunes of the unions are in the new millennium.
