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State of the Unions - Part One
by Peter Hall-Jones  for  www.newunionism.net
  

Shock horror probe: unions are back! In fact it turns out that they never went away. Not only are they growing, a fact that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom, but the data suggests that a lot more growth is going unrecorded, and that the potential for sustained growth has never been higher. On top of this, they are finding new ways to unite and organise across borders. In this surprising new report, the New Unionism network suggests that we owe it to ourselves to stop perpetuating the myth of union decline.

As we show below, the best available data - largely from the ILO and EIRO - suggests that union membership in most countries has increased, not decreased, in the last five years. Furthermore, there are plenty of reasons to think that these figures under-represent the real situation internationally.

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The ILO did its last international report (1) on trade union membership ten years ago, in 1997. Nobody else keeps proper international figures. It might be interesting to ask, then, just why everybody is going around saying that the movement is in decline. But that is a political question. Let's stick with the numbers for a while.

There are surprisingly few of them around. In order to get the best sample we concentrated on the five year period since the last study - ie from 1998 to 2003. This is the period for which we have the most information. There are two major sources to call on, both being collections of material gathered together from national sources. These are the ILO and the EIRO.

Taken together, we can use these to produce comparable figures for 39 countries. Of these, 23 (59%) experienced trade union membership growth since 1998.

Table 1

  
From this point on it rapidly gets political. We included China in the table above, simply because that was the data the ILO gave us. But most union commentators would argue that China should be treated as a separate case. The national federation (ACFTU) is not generally regarded as being sufficiently independent from the State to meet certain definitions.(4) Furthermore, as the Hong Kong liaison office of the ICFTU argues, some of this membership growth may exist on paper only (3).

It’s an interesting argument, because on the one hand we are counting as a negative the loss of manufacturing jobs (and union members) in developed countries, and on the other hand we are refusing to count the corresponding increase that this transfer has generated in China. Given that we are talking about 44,843,447 workers, our totals are completely dependent on how we treat this question. It comes at a time when an authoratative new GLS report shows how US-based corporations like Microsoft, Nike, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Google, UPS, and Intel are actively lobbying against Chinese legislation which would give basic labour rights to Chinese workers. The companies are threatening to withdraw if the law is passed. The globalization of labour is throwing up complex new questions, and the old answers simply don't work anymore. It would be interesting to hear from the globalisation think tanks on how we are to resolve this, because it is an issue which isn't going away in the near future.

The next challenge the same people might consider is what one does with the numbers from Eastern Europe, where trade union membership used to be more or less mandatory. In particular, the reversal of this policy led to huge losses in four Eastern European countries and the reunited Germany. (The same countries then went through massive changes in industrial relations legislation, deindustrialisation, and huge increases in unemployment). Like China, it would seem natural to treat these figures as something of a special case. But how?

In the meantime, let’s consider the rest of Europe separately. Here we find that membership has increased by 1,401,636 members over the given period, or 3.6%. This includes growth in 83% of the countries involved!

Anyone for more politics? The countries with the most wealth tend to be the ones with the best infrastructure for measuring statistics. If we look at the 39 countries listed above we can see this clearly. And yet it is the less developed countries which are increasingly the host of the manufacturing sector. Could it be that a huge amount of union growth is going unrecorded as a result? Table 2 looks at the meagre data we have from such countries, and suggests that an increase in the manufacturing base seems to be accompanied by a sturdy increase in union membership.

  
Table 2

Source:
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/portal/dbases.htm

This continues the trend identified in the last ILO report, where some of the largest national increases were: South Africa (130.8%), Bangladesh (58%), Republic of Korea (61%), the Philippines (69%), Thailand (77%) and Zimbabwe (54%).

Let’s face it, more and more data is getting lost from the radar as globalisation shifts the centres of production. Union membership numbers are being lost. In most countries trade union membership figures do not seem to be centrally recorded at all. How can we know, for instance, if union membership is increasing throughout Africa? The last ILO report suggested that it was(5), but what has happened since? Clementine Dehwe, coordinator of the Global Unions HIV Project, reports that in some countries profiteers regularly take workers’ fees claiming to be from the union, only to pocket the proceeds. Now there’s a category which has never been considered before: the dues-paying non-member. And then there are all those whose membership is stored in notebooks or card systems which nobody has the resources to collate. Or the workers in various Arabian Gulf countries where unions are still outlawed, and/or subject to heavy legal restrictions. Again, memberships not counted.

One can see why the ILO has been so wary of tackling another global report! But let's remind ourselves, in the midst of all this, that no matter way which way we treat these questions: in the period we have looked at union numbers went up in more countries than not.

There is another factor which we can be sure has impacted negatively on union statistics during the last ten years. Without knowing to what extent, we can say that membership figures are significantly reduced when data audits take place, especially during times such as union mergers. People who haven't paid for years are finally discarded. One senior public sector unionist who lived through a decade of such mergers in Australia estimated that up to 20% of “membership loss” during that time was an illusion generated by data audits and advances in record keeping.

The standard measure of union strength is “membership density” – the proportion of people in the workforce who are union members. This is a very dubious indicator. At best it can only tell part of the story. With this indicator employers effectively control half the process by which union strength is measured. If a factory starts up and employs three hundred workers, union density decreases overnight. Obviously the union must first find these new workers, and then it must strive to recruit them. It does so without any extra resources. Naturally this takes time. More importantly, though, the employment context has also changed. These new workers are being employed (probably) in countries where employers are now more free than they were a few years ago to use industrial mechanisms to dissuade or prevent them from becoming unionised.

Let's extend the same scenario to a global scale. Between 1970 and 2000 the size of the world’s labour force more than doubled.(6) In fact a recent study suggests that over 3 billion people are working or looking for work, a number which is expected to grow by 430 million by 2015, with almost all of the new entrants coming from developing countries(7).  So unions must race just to stand still, in terms of membership density. As we have seen, they are succeeding in that membership numbers are growing. And yet the “density” measurement portrays them in the public mind as continually dwindling.

In a recent paper Dutch academic Jelle Visser, perhaps the world’s leading authority on statistics relating to union membership and activity, shows that between between 1998 and 2003, membership density fell by less than 2%. (9)

Unfortunately we do not have corresponding data from the ILO regarding the concurrent change in size of the paid labour force. However from the data we do have, we can safely assume that it is far in excess of +2%. In other words, the erroneous picture of unions dwindling away is simply created by the fact that unions are not keeping pace with the growth in the workforce.

In fact union growth figures are often confused or distorted by factors such as these; things which are beyond the control of unions but make the statistics look grimmer than they should. Changes in legislation or even definitions can have a huge effect. A single decision (think Homeland Security in the U.S.(8) can render years and years of successful recruitment campaigns invisible.

In a nutshell, the problem is not that unions are shrinking. No matter how we look at the available figures, there are more countries experiencing membership growth than membership decline. On top of this, there are many factors mentioned above which suggest that large amounts of membership growth is going unaccounted for. Again: the problem is not that unions are shrinking. It is that they are not growing as fast as they might.

Recognising this, there seems to be a collective pressure building within the union movement for new ideas, new tactics and new forms. "Global alliances", often involving Union Network International and the North American-based Service Employees International Union, seem to be paving the way for a new form of international solidarity, where alliance partners “act nationally but think globally” in industries such as cleaning, telecommunications, transport, security and catering.

An initiative being discussed last month (January 2007) may also lead to the world's first multinational union, bringing together unions from the UK, Germany and the United States to build a united voice for over six million members, many of whom work in multinational companies. And the merger late last year of two international union confederations (see http://www.ituc-csi.org/) has created the largest workers' body ever seen, representing upwards of 168 million workers in more than 150 countries. On top of this comes February's announcement of "the Council of Global Unions", a new body including the ITUC, global union federations and the OECD Trade Union Advisory Committee.

Union decline is a myth, and it is time we stopped perpetuating it. The real challenge for the union movement is not to save itself from collapse; it is to find a strategy for growth and influence at a time when the potential has never been so good.

Part Two of this discussion is available here 

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9 Visser, Jelle A Century of Unions – trade union membership, employment, unemployment and density in thirty countries, 1900-2000, AIAS Working Paper 2004