trade unions

trade unions Collective organizations of workers/employees which aim at promoting the welfare of their members, especially through securing higher wages and shorter working hours. As a rule, they developed in industrializing nations first among skilled workers, who were in relatively short supply and thus had greater bargaining power. Hence, the first workers to organize unions in Britain were engineers (1850), and in Germany printers (1866) and cigarworkers (1865). Unions of unskilled labour, whose members could easily be made redundant if they striked, only became successful and increased in strength after 1900 as unions improved their organization and their political influence. This could be accomplished either directly (the CGT in France) or indirectly through socialist parties (the Labour Party in Britain and Australia, the SPD in Germany). Among the different types of trade unions were the free trade unions (e.g. in Britain, the USA, Australia, and Canada), Communist trade unions (which emerged from the turn of the century in Russia, Czechoslovakia, France, Austria, Spain, and Poland), syndicalist trade unions, and Christian trade unions (e.g. in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany).

In most countries, trade unions experienced a dramatic decline in membership after the economic recession of the 1970s. In Europe, northern countries have generally been more unionized than southern ones: in 1990, in Denmark 80 per cent of the workforce belonged to a trade union, in Belgium 75 per cent, Republic of Ireland 44 per cent, the UK 43 per cent, Germany 42 per cent, Italy 40 per cent, Portugal 30 per cent, Greece 18 per cent, Spain 10 per cent, and France 10 per cent. By contrast, the less unionized countries in the European south have had a much higher annual strike rate. In 1994, for example, there were 1,268 official strikes in Spain with 4.8 million participating workers. In France, the unionized workers were heavily concentrated in the public sector, so that strikes against Juppé's social reforms in December 1995 brought the entire country to a standstill for weeks.

The reason for this paradox is that countries with a traditionally strong degree of unionization tend to have developed and sophisticated mechanisms for wage bargaining, which avoid strikes altogether. Similarly, countries with very weak trade unions have also seen a low strike rate, since workers are insufficiently organized for industrial action. By contrast, in countries where trade unions are sufficiently strong to organize workers, but where they do not enjoy a near-monopoly over wage bargaining, large-scale strikes occur most frequently. In those systems, trade unions often feel more compelled to go on strike to keep their often declining membership, and they are unable to control industrial action by non-unionized workers. With their relatively rigid craft-based membership structures, trade unions worldwide have been challenged by the advent of globalization from the 1980s. Increasingly, frequent job changes have led to a loss of traditional worker identities, often forcing an abandonment of trade-union affiliation.

TUC; AFL-CIO; Industrial Workers of the World; oil-price shock