Trade Union Woes

The latest figures on trade union membership were published by the Office of National Statistics last week. They will not make for happy reading for the unions.

The figures show a drop in membership from 2015-2016 of some 275,000 people. That's around a 4.2% decrease in the number of people who belong to a union. The total number of employees who are trade union members now stands at just above 6.2 million.

At the same time, more people are in employment. The proportion of employees who are union members has also fallen to around 23.5% - down from 24.7% in the previous year. This is the lowest rate of membership recorded since records began in 1995.

Both the public and private sectors have seen decreases in union membership, despite the fact that the private sector had been a source of growth for the last five consecutive years. This year it dropped by 66,000. The public sector saw a much sharper fall in numbers - 209,000. This is significant. The public sector is by far the biggest base of union support, but the density of union members has fallen from 54.9% to 52.7%.

From the figures, we can see that an employee is most likely to be a union member (going by the highest - not seasonally adjusted - density of union membership in each category) if they are:

Welsh: 52.3% of employees had a trade union presence in the workplace. Inner London, by contrast, had 31% representation, and 18.2% of the capital's workforce are union members; A public sector employee: 52.7% of the public sector is a union member, compared with 13.4% in the private sector; Female: 25.9%, compared with 21.1% of males; 50-54 years old: 33.8%, compared with 3.5% in the 16-19 age group, and 17.9% in the 25-29 age group; Professional: 41.6%, compared with...