Anemic unions hunt for new blood

Feature

Posted on September 24, 2012

BRUSSELS/PARIS -- The future of European trade unions is under 30, has never worked an assembly line and is just as likely to wear high heels as work boots.

The experience of Angelina Gill, for example, couldn’t be further from the grime of the furnace and the bustle of the factory floor. And yet she is exactly the kind of member unions need to survive in the 21st century.

The bubbly 29-year-old is a French civil engineer working for a Brussels-based company that employs less than 10 people. She has a masters’ degree in engineering, is fluent in three languages and until recently never dreamed of joining a union.

"I thought unions were just here to strike. That’s the idea I had. I never thought they could help you," she said.

For much of the past 50 years unions have found most of their primarily male, working-class members in heavy industry and the public sector. They flourished in factories or mines with masses of workers whose economic interests were closely aligned, exerting leverage through collective bargaining.

But as the factories closed, economies became increasingly service-oriented and so did most employees. With specialized skills and a more individual sense of their careers, office workers had far less interest in the collective.

The result has contributed to a slow decline for organized labour in many countries, highlighted by shrinking membership and some embarrassing displays of weakness, most recently in the failure to organise a credible resistance to layoffs in the 2009-10 economic crisis.

In France, union membership has fallen from almost 20% in 1980 to just under 8% in 2008. In Germany, it has fallen from 35% to just under 20% in the same period, according to data from the OECD.

But some unions are fighting back, taking to the Web to offer more individualized services and reaching out to highly educated employees in small companies and to temporary and independent workers who traditionally have been ignored.

"I think the awareness is very big within our members, and I think the process has started and yes, I think it will accelerate," said Bernadette Segol, general-secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation.

Since Gill joined her soil analysis firm two years ago, her union has helped her submit tax forms and claim holidays to which she did not know she was entitled.

PROPER GUIDANCE
Over the past few months, Gill’s representative at the liberal CGSLB union, the smallest of three unions in Belgium, has guided her through complex wage negotiations as she prepares to take on a new job, helping her secure a higher salary.

"I have a question, I ask it, I get an answer. What better can there be? They’ve never failed me," she said, likening the service to that of a lawyer but at a far lower cost.

According to European Commission data, two-thirds of private sector workers in the European Union are now employed by companies that have fewer than 250 staff and annual sales of under €50 million. Companies with fewer than 10 workers provide a third of all private sector jobs.

Richard Hyman, professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics, says unions are stepping up efforts to appeal to non-traditional members.

"[Unions] have got to find ways of using what they’ve got more smartly and I think in a lot of unions people are conscious of that and are trying to look at ways in which they can do this," he said.

In France, which has one of the lowest percentages of unionized workers of any OECD nation, unions had little incentive to find new members due to a law dating back to 1948.

Under the law, only five unions were allowed to represent workers in collective agreements, and those five had "irrevocable" rights to representation, meaning that workers had no choice about who represented them. Unions were supported financially by the state and management; membership dues only accounted for a small fraction of their income.

That changed in 2008 with a law that said unions needed to win the votes of at least 10% of a firm’s workers to be able to represent them.

Many European unions are evolving into a type of advisory service that moves with workers from job to job to help them negotiate the best contract and get help with tax returns.

"When you just get out of university, you have no clue of how the working sphere works. You have no clue what you can ask as a salary," said civil engineer Gill.

"If I’d have known, I think I would have joined the union before my first job, because when you have to negotiate your first salary you are just lost, and of course that’s the moment when they try to get the most out of you."

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