Trade Union Decline and Transformation: Where to for Employment Relations?

Abstract

One of the central social institutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trade union is a diminished force in most Western societies. In the United States, only 6.5% of private sector workers were in a union in 2018. In Australia, where 64.9% of the workforce belonged in 1948, only 14.5% of the nation’s employees held a union card in 2016. Across the last three decades, a variety of factors have been identified as supposed causal factors: higher productivity in nonunion workplaces, lacklustre organizing, and neoliberal governments. In most of the literature, union decline has been associated with a growth in precarious employment and independent contracting. In exploring both union decline and employment transformation, this chapter pays particular attention to circumstances in the United States, Australia, and Canada. In doing so, it argues that most current academic understandings are based on myth and error. In the last 40 years, it is high-paid professional and managerial work that has grown in leaps and bounds, not low-paid service work. In all Western societies, self-employment and independent contracting are inconsequential. Despite expressed concern for the poor, unions in America, Australia, and Canada are today dominated by high-paid workers employed in health, education, and the public sector; a cohort that makes up around 60% of the union membership in all three countries.