Scribblings

The dying of the trade union light?

Once they were an enormous power in many lands. Now, they are just a pale shadow of what they once were. They commanded a seat at the economic table. Today, they are asking for laws to be passed to give them back some leverage. I am talking about trade unions in the private sector in what I call the “legacy market economies”: Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and other OECD countries.

Look at the numbers from the OECD here. Overall union density has halved since 1985, falling from 30% to 15% in 2023/24. On average across 28 OECD countries, 14.3% of women in employment were unionised in 2024 vs. 15% of men. In contrast, unionisation was much stronger in the public sector, with 41.3% of employees unionised in 2024 compared to 10.1% in the private sector. Put this another way. In OECD countries, 9 out of 10 workers in the private sector are not union members. Dig into the numbers, and you will find that private sector membership is concentrated in what can be called “old industries”: food and drink; auto manufacturing; the docks, transport; some retail. But in the newer sectors, membership is almost non-existent.

Which is not to say that there are not a few activists here and there in the newer industries. But increasingly these activists are not concerned with economic issues, the original raison d’etre of trade unions. They are agitated by sexual politics or what they see as moral causes, such as who the company they work for does business with.

The problem is that not everyone believes in the same moral crusades. Go back a bit. There were some unions in the US which opposed the Vietnam War. But there were construction union hardhats who backed Nixon. A recent UK poll showed that about 50% of union members plan to vote for Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party.

Two people in a workplace may agree that they need a wage increase. Money always talks. Beyond that, they may not agree on anything else. Any attempt to try and rebuild unions on the basis of a moral/political strategy is going to go nowhere. Unions work best when they are narrowly focused economic actors. Unfortunately, most union leaders want to be political players. This may have worked in the old days of a predominantly blue-collar working class, most of whom lived in close-knit cohesive communities. But today’s working class, by whom I mean those who live on a weekly or monthly pay cheque, small or big, and who would find themselves in difficulty if the cheques stopped coming, are more scattered and diverse and not easy to organise.

The words from the Springsteen song The River come to mind:

And for my 19^th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat.

You got the union card, and you held it for life, whatever about the marriage. Because you probably stayed in the one job for life. Lived in the same house, drank in the same bar, supported the local sports team, were part of a community.

Those days are gone. And they are not coming back. Even if manufacturing industries are “reshored” to ensure economic and defence resilience, they will be “jobs light”, run by AI-controlled robots, with a minimum of human intervention.

So unions in the private sector find themselves in difficulties. Public sector unions are a different matter, but public sector unions are not what this piece is about. Private sector unions can no longer depend on a “job for life” cadre but are constantly having to think about recruiting and organising. Which is not easy. Especially when employers are not receptive. And why would they be?

A union representative knocks on an employer’s door. I’d like to come in and talk to your workers about the benefits of joining a union and collective bargaining. What would that mean, asks the employer. Well, we would be pushing to increase the workers’ wages and better their conditions of employment, and we would like to ensure that they had a say in management decision-making.

Let me get this straight, says the employer. You want to come in, organise my workers, increase my costs, dent my profit margins, and curtail my decision-making powers? Do I have that right? That’s about it, says the union organiser. There’s the door, say the employer. Close it on your way out.

In other words, trying to organise workers into a union in today’s world is a tough sell. But then it was never easy. Ask Jim Larkin, Ernie Bevin, or Walter Reuther, just to mention three union leaders from Ireland, the UK, and the US. They all fought difficult and bloody battles. Fights over economic rewards in a capitalist, market economy are never going to be a Sunday picnic. As my friend Rick Warters puts, that's because “everyone wants more”. And if you get more, I may get less. Win/win solutions tend to be hard to come by despite what some of the academic texts on negotiations suggest. There is no win/win when you close a plant and make 1,200 workers redundant, no matter what the “social plan” may provide.

If the industrial leverage that was delivered to the unions by a mass membership is a thing of the past, then they need to find other forms of leverage if they are to continue in business.

Ten or fifteen years back they thought that International Framework Agreements (IFAs) with multinational companies might be a way forward. They saw these agreements as enabling them to recruit on a global scale. At the last count, there are around 300 IFAs, but most of these are with French or German companies. There are no fully-formed IFAs with US companies. In recent months, IndustriAll tore up its IFA with Mercedes because it was of little value to it as the United Auto Workers (UAW) tried to organise the Mercedes plant in Alabama. IFAs turned out to be a false dawn. They appeared to shine brightly but soon faded.

Now, the unions are increasingly turning to the law as a source of leverage. During 2024 and 2025, unions pushed hard for European Works Councils to be able to go to court and ask for injunctions to block management decisions. Member state governments, acting through the Council of Ministers, refused to accede to the demand.

Unions believe that Article 4 of the EU’s Adequate Minimum Wage Directive, which calls for national action plans where collective bargaining coverage falls below 80% of the workforce, will force the hand of governments. But as France shows, you can have near universal bargaining coverage through legal extension mechanisms while still leaving the unions with very few members. Bargaining coverage in France is 98%. Union density in the private sector is around 5-6%. To date, EU governments have shown scant interest in pushing the boundaries of Article 4. See here. More disappointment looms, it would seem.

Unions have also invested heavily in due diligence laws such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), but these have been pared back to the bone through the Omnibus process and are now weak things that, in reality, offer little.

But maybe there are a couple of bright spots.

In the UK, unions are hoping that the Employment Relations Act 2025, with its loosened rules on a legal route to union recognition, will help them rebuild their depleted membership. It remains to be seen if it will.

Unions in the US have managed to get the House of Representatives to pass the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The law would require employers to open negotiations with a union within ten days of the union gaining recognition, most likely through a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election. The parties would then have 90 days to reach an agreement. If no agreement is reached, Federal mediators get involved, with a further 30 days to see if an agreement can be found. Absence an agreement, the matter goes to binding arbitration by a three-person panel, with the resulting imposed contract valid for two years here.

As things stand, it can take 450 days to negotiate a first contract, if indeed one is ever negotiated. The FLCA is designed to dramatically cut that timescale.

Whether the Act makes it through the Senate remains to be seen, and then it would have to be signed by President Trump. Neither seems likely.

You also have to ask if government-imposed terms and conditions through arbitration can be considered collective bargaining as defined by the International Labour Organisation in Convention 98? It seems unlikely that it would be. I presume the union response is that they do not care what it is called if it delivers improved pay and working conditions for their members. But what happens at the end of the two years? Can the employer simply tear up the agreement and walk away from it?

The most significant thing about the Act is that it was backed by 20 Republicans in the House, and the push on it is being led in the Senate by a Republican, Josh Hawley. What happens if the Democrats take the House and Senate in the midterms? Could the US be on the cusp of the biggest change in labour law since the 1930s? Expect significant employer pushback in the weeks and months ahead.

While the unions in the US see “first contract arbitration” as an answer to their problems, the unions north of the border in Canada don’t seem to like arbitration, preferring the right to strike here. Which raises the question: If unions start calling for arbitration in contract negotiations, why not arbitration in all industrial disputes?

Will any of these initiatives turn around the fortunes of the trade unions? I am not persuaded that they will. But if the light of the trade unions is dying, they will not go quietly into that good night. There may be some fight left in them yet.

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