‘Partnership’: A Serious Strategy for UK Trade Unions?

Abstract

The statistics of union decline in the United Kingdom since 1979 are familiar, depressingly so to those who hold a strong trade union movement to be a central guarantor of a degree of economic and industrial democracy. Union membership fell from 12.6 million in 1979 to 7.1 million in 1998, a fall in the membership density of the employed workforce from 56 per cent to 30 per cent (Waddington and Kerr, 2000: 231). By 2000 membership had fallen to below 7 million. In the last few years there has been a flattening-out, even a slight upturn, but not enough to mask the trauma of decline, most marked in the private sector. In 1980 well over half of all private sector employees were union members; by 1998 this had fallen to a quarter, and by late 1999 estimates put it as low as 19 per cent. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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