Monday 8th September to Friday 3rd October
To respond to the survey: https://forms.gle/HkSJrJwvjE21Pa64A
One of the things about being a local Trade Union activist is that you end up doing things you never thought you would need to, and also working out how to do them for yourself – as opposed to having the resources to get someone to do them for you.
So – this is the first time we have tried to do a local survey, and it turns out to be full of potential for the heebie-jeebies. Have we picked the right “tool”? Will it work at the scale we want it to? Will people join in and participate? Will the questions we have asked give us any insight when we have had them answered?
We won’t know until we try – so: apologies now if this project falls apart and we end up with egg on our face.
We thought, though, that we should try this – driven by the idea that young workers need Trade Unions, but that Trade Unions also need young members to become more involved. There is more than a pinch of self interest. Take a snapshot of an average Trades Council meeting and you will realise – we are short of people to pass the baton on to!
According to the Department for Business and Trade “The distribution of trade union membership across age groups has changed since 1995. In 1995, those aged 35 to 49 were the most likely to be trade union members, whereas in 2024, it was those aged 50 or over”.
A TUC Equality Audit in 2022 found that age monitoring was not much employed by Trade Unions, but it said that “Of the unions that were able to provide sufficient data on the representation of young workers among workplace/ branch activists, virtually none showed young members being proportionately represented at any level”. The TUC believes that “over half of union reps are 50 and over, which means over the next 10 to 15 years we will lose over half our reps”. This threatens to continue a long decline in the number of shop-stewards – the basic connective tissue of trade unionism. In the 1980s, according to NIESR, we had over 300,000 shop-stewards. By the start of the C21st, there were less than 100,000.
Trade Union membership and participation has been struggling since the 1980s. But young member engagement has fallen even sharper than the general trend, as this chart from the New Economics Foundation shows:
What is going on? It is not as if young workers are sitting in clover. They are more likely to be in insecure work and low paid jobs.
A TUC analysis is 2023 found that the unemployment rate for under 25s was nearly three times higher than for all workers (12.3 per cent compared to 4.2 per cent), meaning that one in eight young people were without a job.
13 per cent of workers aged 16-24 were employed on a 0-hours contract, compared to 2.4 per cent of workers aged 25 and over. Despite only being 11 per cent of the total workforce, young workers made up 40 per cent of the 1.18 million workers employed on 0-hours.
Median hourly pay for 16 to 17-year-old employees was £8 per hour and £10.90 for 18 to 21-year-olds compared to £15.83 for all employees. Whilst lower hourly pay amongst young workers as they first enter the labour market might be expected, too many young people still earn below a living wage and are overrepresented in low paid occupations
In a 2024 cost-of-living survey by the USDAW retail union, members aged under 27 were more likely to have been late on rent or mortgage payments (30% compared with 21% among all ages); struggled to pay energy bills (65% as against 60%) and were more likely to want more hours of work (36% as against 21%).
According to the Labour Research Department other themes that tend to crop up, when young workers and members are asked, range from a lack of training, under-staffing at work and low career progression, to worries about racism, sexual harassment and trans rights. In a recent survey by the UNISON public services union, 81% of young members said they had experienced mental health problems.
Much of this is no doubt due to shifts in the economy. Our interpretation is that it has not been a question of workers leaving unions, so much as a question of unionised work being destroyed and of unions not being able to organise in new employment sectors, partly because of employer resistance.
In November 2015 Carl Roper noted at an event at Birmingham University Business School that young workers often have no choice but to take work in sectors where there is little or no Trade Union organisation:
“In 2012 there were half a million young people employed in accommodation and food services, a sector in which union density was just 3.5 per cent. Almost one million young people worked in wholesale and retail where density was 12 per cent and almost a quarter of a million worked in manufacturing where less than one in five workers were in a union”.
Writing in the NIESR Report “Trade Union Membership and Influence, 1999-2014” (published in 2015) John Forth and Alex Bryson commented that: “The percentage of all employees who have never been a member of a trade union has risen continually over the past 20 years such that, by 2009-10, over half of all employees were ‘never-members’……… In 2014, almost three-fifths (58 per cent) of employees were located in non-union workplaces, with this figure being particularly high in private sector service industries, such as ‘Accommodation and food service’ and among young workers”.
Solving the young worker membership problem would be a win/win step forward for Trade Unions – a way for young workers’ conditions to improve and for Trade Union vitality to be boosted.
How will this survey help? Well, we hope it will do a couple of things. We hope it will help open up a conversation, so that we are not just the “old dusty men” telling those younger what they should be doing. We hope it will signal our curiosity. And we hope it will generate interest, provoking responders to think about some of the issues raised.
The results will be announced at a meeting in the Hornby Lecture Theatre of Blackburn Library at 7pm on Thursday 23rd October,
Where we will be joined by
Fraser McGuire – Chair of TUC Young Members Committee, and
Zaihera Chaudhry – UNISON North West Young Members Committee
to continue the discussion.