21st Century trade unions

In one respect I'm a typical 21st Century worker. I've never been a member of trade union. I've never worked in a unionised workplace. I've never even been approached to join a trade union. Yet I've benefited indirectly from all of the workers rights won by the union movement over its 200 year history, and I respect that unions are important. They just don’t do a very good job of appearing that useful to me today.

As it happens, I have benefited directly from my Dad’s lifetime union membership. About 10 years ago my landlord went bust and my flat was due to be repossessed. I needed to know what my legal situation was, and I needed to know fast. The free telephone legal advice offered by my Dad’s union to his entire immediate family came to the rescue. It was a fantastic service, one that many unions offer to all their members. Yet most people don’t know this. With union density now around 14% in the private sector, for too many people, unions are all about that shouty man on the TV who screws up the trains every now and then. They seem irrelevant to modern day life.

Unions should be selling themselves as the first person you call in any crisis, offering and actively marketing their membership as a package of services that in the private sector would be called various types of insurance but in the union sector should instead be seen as simply peace of mind. Many unions already offer health care plans, home insurance, breakdown cover, etc. through partner organisations. But these are optional extras, not core services. If you were to call to claim on your union’s home insurance, you wouldn't speak to your friendly union rep who you know by name but to an anonymous insurance company call centre operative. This doesn't clearly improve the wellbeing of members; it feels like little more than an opportunity to cash in. Most importantly, precarious workers on short-term contracts should be able to seek financial support from their union when times are hard. Unions should be looking to put payday loan companies, pawn shops, hire purchase companies, and food banks out of business by smoothing personal cash flows in a way that is better, nicer and fairer. It may not be what we want in an ideal world, or the future we were sold in the glory years of the mid-20th Century, but this is the reality of life for many workers today and it is hard to see that changing in the near term.

It’s all very well shouting about the increasingly precarious situation many workers find themselves in, but someone actually needs to do something about it. If the trade unions want to remain a relevant force in the 21st Century, that is their role and they need to step up.