Unions are in grave place and need help from Labour

The National

7 days ago

June 6 was the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the statutory union recognition mechanism.
This procedure provides the means by which unions can compel employers by law to recognise them for collective bargaining on behalf of their members' terms and conditions if certain support thresholds are met.
The introduction of the statutory union recognition mechanism was the key part of Tony Blair's 'New' Labour 'fairness at work' policy. It was put on the statute book in the form of the Employment Relations Act 1999.
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In both the manifesto, from which Labour won a massive landslide majority of 179 seats, and then in the Fairness at Work White Paper 1998 which preceded the Act, the party pledged to introducing a statutory right to union recognition 'where a majority of the relevant workforce wishes it'.
'Simples', as the catchphrase of the meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov, of the Compare the Meerkat advert has it. Except that nothing is ever that 'simples' with New Labour. The pledge was watered down and qualified in a whole host of ways at the behest of big business.
For example, all the votes for union recognition in a ballot of the workforce bargaining group had to also equate to 40% of all those entitled to vote. In other words, non-voters were counted as No voters. Meanwhile, the bargaining unit chosen by the union had to be deemed to be 'compatible with effective management'.
In the 25 years since June 6, 2000, just 1473 applications had been made for union recognition, an average of only 60 a year.
Many of these were re-applications because some 20% of the applications were withdrawn before being subject to the first part of the adjudication.
The reasons were because the unions had made mistakes in their applications or because employers had deliberately recruited more workers in order to reduce the relative level of support for union recognition.
And, to boot, only a third of total applications were actually successful in gaining union recognition in the end. It's not rocket science to think that a more complex and challenging procedure with more thresholds to be passed has something to do with these poor outcomes.
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It's also not rocket science to think that the statutory union recognition mechanism is an inversion of the 'fairness not favours' promise Blair made.
Under pressure from the right-wing media like the Daily Mail not to cave in to the unions – as if that was ever likely – Blair promised 'fairness not favours', hence, the nomenclature of 'fairness at work'.
But the favours were given to big business, and fairness was not given to the unions and their members.
Not doing the Labour thing is what Labour do, as Gerry Hassan put it in the Sunday National at the end of March this year.
Karl Marx's remark that 'history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce' is extremely apposite when it comes to Keir Starmer's Employment Rights Bill. It is the flagship piece of legislation emanating from Labour's New Deal for Working People. The bill is expected to go on the statute book in the autumn after gaining Royal Assent but many of its measures will no be implemented until the autumn of 2026. Again very 'New' Labour.
Where the tragedy of the Employment Relations Act 1999 becomes the farce of the soon-to-be Employment Rights Act 2025 is precisely on the issue of union recognition.
Significant reforms to union recognition and collective bargaining are set out in the legislation but the crucial weakness is that Labour is not also providing a robust right for unions to have access to workers for recruiting and organising.
It simply gives them the right to ask a government body, the Central Arbitration Committee, for this access, but this government body has no powers of enforcement of access rights over employers. The most it can do is fine employers.
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This then undermines the significant improvements being made to the right to union recognition through lowering the levels of worker support needed to gain it from an employer.
In other words, the legislation gives with one hand but takes away with the other.
Unions are in a grave position at the moment. The latest data, for 2024, shows that union density – the proportion of all workers in a union – has now fallen to an all-time low of 22%. In the private sector, which is much bigger than the public sector, density is just 12%.
Unions need to be shown favours in order to allow them to perform their historic role of creating fairness in the economy.
Labour has shown itself again not to be the party capable of doing that.
Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of the 'Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero' (Manchester University Press, 2024).