"Union Strength Erodes: European Trade Unions...

Introduction:

The European trade union movement is not the force it once was. Across Europe, in individual countries, union density, the proportion of the workforce that are members of unions, has been in a long slow, decline over the past twenty years. The decline is documented in the OECD database. See appendix on page 6 for individual country details, from the database.

The trade union site, worker-participation.eu, estimates that the average union density across the EU/EEA is about 24%. If two-thirds of all union members work in the public sector, then it is reasonable to assume that, on average, only about 10% of private sector workers are union members, mostly in “older” industries.

Why the decline?

Across Europe, the original union heartlands were to be found in industrial towns. Coal mining, steel mills, docks, transport, especially rail transport, printing, big manufacturing plants. Most of these industries were male dominated, but not exclusively so. Those who worked in these industries tended to live close to where they worked. They were, literally, communities. Working together and living together created a shared identity and a shared future that could be improved through collective action. 

In these industries, the jobs were for life. You got the job at a young age, and then stayed until you retired. The day you got the job was also the day you got your union card. “Union organising” was never an issue. After the great union battles of the 19th and early 20th century, once organised, a place of work stayed organised and existing members saw that newcomers were immediately signed up.

Those days, those industries, and those communities are mostly gone. Coal mining is but a shadow of what it once was. Automation cut numbers on the docks. Big manufacturers offshored; technology changed printing. As those industries began to disappear, union numbers began to drop.

The new services industries that came along were not conducive to union organising. Even if, for instances, big, fast food chains employed hundreds of thousands of workers, there were employed in multiple, small workplaces, often geographically distanced from one another. Nor were these jobs for life. Turnover was often staggering. If you did not plan to stay for too long, why get involved with a union?

At the other end of the spectrum, the tech sector, pay and working conditions were such that workers did not feel the need for a union. Even when these industries got hit with redundancies in recent years, they did not subsequently end up unionising. Rarely, have unions been able to stop job cuts.

If that was true of the tech sector when everyone had to report to the office everyday, it is probably even more true now that remote and hybrid work structures have put down strong roots. Unionisation arises out of a sense of a shared collective identity, as noted above. Remote and hybrid work is individualistic in nature, and lessens the collective sense.

And tech workers being tech savvy know how to use social media to highlight grievances and complaints. And what they highlight on social media are not classic collective bargaining issues like pay and working hours. Instead, it is concerns about the environment, identity issues, and ethical business practices. “Should we be selling facial recognition technology to authoritarian regimes?” “Should we be contracting with the military?”. Not issues for the classic bargaining table.

And let’s be candid. Many trade unions do not come across as particularly attractive. Too often, they seem to be the playthings of various self-described “left factions” that see unions a part of the class struggle, and union members as warriors in that struggle. There is a type of union leader for whom the “struggle” is everything, the fight is what it is all about, for whom the barricades always beckon.

In my own experience, there are some workers who are attracted to “permanent revolution”. But 99% of employees just want safe and comfortable working conditions and to go home with a decent pay cheque. Unions who go on about “confronting global capital” and “holding management to account” do not seem to realise that this is not necessarily a good recruiting strategy. 

But then, many union leaders live in bubbles. Indeed, some have little or no “shop-floor” experience, joining union research departments straight from university and having a theoretical rather than an experiential understanding of the issues.  Skilled at constructing elegant models of representation or producing reports packed with high-end graphics, less so at recruiting actual members. 

There is one other thing that needs to be considered. The increased sophistication of human resource management. Unions were once described as channels of discontent. And they were when management was tin-eared about employee concerns. But that is no longer the case. Management now listens and is increasingly adept at picking up early signs of something going wrong. 

AI will increase the ability of HR to “monitor” the workplace, and by monitor I do not mean over-intrusive surveillance. I mean the ability to interrogate data that everyday workplace reporting systems throw up. Spot a problem. Cut it off before it has the chance to grow. With the aid of AI, HR might now be described as the “preventers of discontent”. 

There is another problem, as I see it. That is, unions announcing they are going to “organise” a particular company. Let me put this crudely. This amounts to: “We, an external organisation, are going to come into your workplace and recruit your workers. Then, we will push up your labour costs and make it more difficult for you to make decisions about production, work organisation and lots of other things”. And they wonder why employers push back against this. This is what might be called “push unionisation”. As opposed to “pull unionisation” where workers invite the union into the workplace because they have unanswered grievances. Unions less as “channels of discontent”, more as “manufacturers of discontent”. 

When unions position themselves this way, they just come across as another seller of a service, and one that is inimical to the interests of management.  Yet the unions are demanding the legal right to be able to enter workplaces to promote what they are offering, whether management agrees or not. This demand is rooted in the belief that, whether they have members in a workplace or not, they have a quasi-divine right to speak for workers and the only reason workers are not members is that union missionaries have not had the chance to deliver the “word” to them. 

Can trade unions turn things around?

Let me say right away, I doubt it. Unions were worker organisations of a time and place that have both largely passed. They are not insignificant organisations, but outside the public sector and some traditional strongholds, they are largely running on empty. They simply do not have the leverage it takes to make a difference.

Where they exist, unions will continue to be important, but only to some extent. As I write this, Unilever is planning 7,500 job cuts. Audi has announced that it will close its Brussels, Belgium plant with the loss of 3,000 direct jobs and who knows how many indirect jobs. Volkswagen, the beating heart of the German economy and the bedrock of IG Metall membership, has just said it is considering closing plants in Germany. 

Can the unions stop these job cuts? Unlikely. At best they can negotiate the compensation packages. Unions can rarely stop management from taking what management believes to be critical business decisions. 

At the level of the European Union, and in Member States, the unions are increasingly turning to the law to compensate for membership weakness. I call this “lawdust”, as in stardust, the belief that a sprinkling of law will produce a magical result. Stardust does not exist. Neither does lawdust. To give some examples.

• The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and its political allies in the European Parliament, pushed for the revision of the European Works Council Directive (EWCD). Their version would give EWCs the right to request court injunctions to block management decisions where an EWC believed in had not been properly informed and consulted. Those who understand the realities of labour relations, know that EWCs would reach for injunctions every time management proposed a major restructuring. Which is why the Council of Ministers, and the Commission, will never agree to this. 
• The ETUC, again with European Parliament allies, wants a revision of European laws on public procurement, the money that is spent by governments at every level, down to the very local, across the EU every year on goods and services to be restricted to undertakings that engage with unions and have collective bargaining agreements. But as we have noted earlier, only about 10% of private sector workers are in union, so the ETUC proposals would seem to exclude the majority of EU-based businesses from bidding for public sector contracts. Unless they agree to engage with unions and negotiate collective bargaining agreements. I cannot see national governments buying into this. 
• A new idea has now been floated by the unions is to restrict the ability of undertakings to move production across borders, either within the EU, or out of the EU. But if undertakings know that if the invest in the EU they will be “nailed to the floor” why would they invest in the EU? And EU-based businesses will look to invest elsewhere. That’s what undertakings in market economies do. 

The above three are laws that are either in the pipeline, the EWCD, or may be proposed in the next few years. For now, however, the great big hope of the unions is the Adequate Minimum Wage Directive. The unions are not all that excited about the actual minimum wage part of the Directive. Unions in Scandinavia positively dislike it and actively campaigned against it. The Danish government is challenging it in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as outside the competence of the EU and contrary to the Scandinavian labour market model. 

What gets union blood racing is Article 4 of the Directive which requires Member States to put in place actions plans to “promote” collective bargaining if collective bargaining coverage falls below 80% of the workforce. 

That something is “promoted” does not mean that anyone will buy it. Collective bargaining cannot be imposed on unwilling parties, and that includes employees as well as employers. You can force people into the same room, maybe even make them talk to one another, but you can never force them to agree. Look at the US experience of bargaining after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has approved a union as the bargaining agent of a group of workers. How many years, if ever, before a first contract is reached? 

It is also worth noting that the Adequate Minimum Wage Directive refers to bargaining coverage, not union membership. In France, for example, see the table above, union density is today less than 10%. Collective bargaining coverage is 98%. So, even if governments were to deliver increased collective bargaining coverage, that does not necessarily mean a growth in union membership. In fact, if workers are to get the benefits anyway, why join and pay subscriptions? As an addendum, the unions in France are propped up by government money. There are historic reasons for this that are not likely to be replicated elsewhere.

A key union demand is that the transposition of the Adequate Minimum Wage Directive into national law should lay the basis for a return to sectoral collective bargaining. Sectoral bargaining suits the unions because it is “resource effective”. One negotiation for a whole sector, instead of multiple negotiations, enterprise-by-enterprise. 

The problem for the unions is that where it does not already exist, there is simply no appetite on the part of employers for sectoral collective bargaining. If, without the leverage of membership numbers that allow you to call an effective strike you cannot force an individual employer to negotiate, how can you force multiple employers to bargain with you if they do not want to? Ask the government to force them to do so? Does anyone think this is going to happen?

Union financed studies demonstrating the “benefits” of sectoral bargaining for all concerned is not going to change that reality. It is unlikely that the Adequate Minimum Wage Directive is going to be transformative in any significant way. Certainly, governments will “promote” collective bargaining, but it is likely to be so low key that if you blink you will miss it. And to repeat. Even if governments succeed in extending collective bargaining coverage, collective bargaining coverage and union membership are not the same thing. 

Employee Voice

European Union laws, and “lawdust”, are not going to help the unions rebuild membership. Finding an attractive offer to today’s workforce will be up to the unions themselves to craft. At the same time EU laws will offer a significant opportunity to enhance employee voice in the workplace.

Directives such as the Collective Redundancies Directive, the European Works Council Directive, the Transfer of Undertakings Directive, the Framework Information and Consultation Directive, the European Company Statute Directive, and health and safety laws compliment national laws on works councils, where such laws exist. These European laws, some more so than others, offer employees a voice in their workplace that is not dependent on union membership. 

There are now a number of new Directives coming into force that would expand the opportunity for employee voice, if employees chose to make use of the new opportunities. This is not necessarily always the case. All too often, the majority of employees are simply not interested in being involved in representative structures, leaving them opened to be “captured” by an activist minority who may have agendas of their own. 

These Directives include: The Pay Transparency Directive; The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive; The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive; The Status of Platform Workers Directive; The AI Act. These are all agreed and in the process of being transposed into national law.

Currently in the legislative pipeline is a Directive on Remote Work and the Right to Disconnect. During the coming five-year Commission and European Parliament term we are likely to see proposals for a law on AI in the Workplace and a push, certainly from the Parliament, for a law on “Restructuring and Just Transition”. 

Management in member companies need to take the totality of this existing and emerging legislative framework on board and work through what it means for their labour and employee relations strategy in Europe. For example, to avoid “activist capture” they could make it clear that they value and appreciate employees who take up a representative role and that this will stand to their career progression in the company. 

Outside the small group of countries that have works councils, framework agreements on representation would be developed that limit the amount of time any one person can spend as a representative and stagger elections to ensure continuity.

In other words, think through things and ask what you can proactively do. Control events, rather than be at their mercy.