Trade union membership is growing during these tough times and it’s thanks to women. That’s the headline that leaps out at me from the latest government stats on trade union membership.
Union membership has grown by 59,000 since 2011 to 6.455 million. Women make up 40,000 of that growth. This is part of a longer term trend that has seen women grow from being 45 percent of the union movement in 1995 to 54.7 percent today.
Trades unionists march during the national strike to defend public service pensions on 30 November 2011.
The excellent Unison Active blog has picked up on an interesting debate going on in the US labour movement that has some relevance for unions in the UK; to what extent is union density and membership linked to union power and influence?
It’s obvious that to establish relevance and legitimacy unions need to increase membership, so in many ways the more interesting discussion – apart from how unions can most effectively increase membership and density – is about how unions turn membership into power and influence.
The latest figures for US trade union membership tell two stories. One is the story of the effect of austerity on trade union membership levels; but the deeper story is about how austerity hits jobs and living standards. The two are inexorably linked.
AFLCIO President Rich Trumka said of the latest statistics:
“Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.
“Union membership impacts every other economic outcome that matters to all workers – falling wages, rising health care costs, home foreclosures, the loss of manufacturing jobs and disappearing retirement benefits. Collective action through unions remains the single best way for working people to effect change. But our still-struggling economy, weak laws and political as well as ideological assaults have taken a toll on union membership, and in the process have also imperiled economic security and good, middle class jobs.”
I’m so excited to be doing my first international book tour, bringing my new book, Playing Bigger Than You Are: An Organizer’s Life, to Britain, and working to deliver training for the TUC’s Organising Academy. The book is all about the 40 years I’ve spent as a community and union organizer in America, mostly in the American South.
I’ve been blessed to be in the middle of several historic moments in America – the civil rights movement, new organizing in the South, taking on the Ku Klux Klan (and being threatened with being cut “from asshole to appetite” for my trouble), tackling America’s extreme right and being threatened by the rightwing militia with being stalked and assassinated.
As I travel around Britain next week, I will be focusing on the lessons of my work organizing on some of the most difficult turf there is – and the work of the British unions to organize in new sectors and new workplaces.
What have Bolivia, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines and Uruguay got in common? They are the seven nations which have so far ratified ILO Convention 189 on equal rights for domestic workers since it was adopted by the ILO in 2011. The UK Government hasn’t, and even abstained even on the adoption of the Convention (the CBI were almost alone in voting against!) because it claims that the health and safety implications would make it impossible to implement.
This month, on international migration day (12 December), the TUC joined with Anti-Slavery International and two migrant domestic worker organisations, Justice4DomesticWorkers and Kalayaan, to urge the British government to ratify. We’re part of an international campaign which also includes the ITUC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and so on.
This is a guest posting by Mike Smith, Head of Secretariat for the TUC
It was fascinating to hear from Helen Kelly, President of the NZCTU, about what unions in New Zealand are doing to tackle problems that are both similar to those we face in the UK, but significantly different, both in terms of the size of country and areas of organisational strength.
Helen Kelly speaks at a Port of Auckland union rally. Photo by Maritime Union of New Zealand
I don’t think that anyone who heard Helen Kelly, President of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions speak at the TUC recently could have failed to be impressed. There was a great freshness and directness about her delivery and, of course, it’s great to see another national centre being lead by a woman. But it was the subject of her presentation – on the NZCTU’s “Together” programme that really set me thinking. This is a different take on the “community-based” trade unionism championed not just by Unite and Community but also unions like my own CWU, who have always looked to support members and their families at home as well as work, and often when they are out of work as well as employed.
Ben Moxham
Carl Roper
Owen Tudor
Stewart Acuff
StrongerUnions
Simon Sapper
