A sundown on the horizon for Europe’s old-style trade unions

By Jerome Glass

Date: 28/04/05

Trade unions across the EU are unlikely to appreciate the irony of their present situation. Once powerful and populous guardians of workers in the face of the harsher side of capitalism, the trade unions are increasingly becoming victims of the very market economy from which they protect their members. The result, in many member states, is declining membership and a fall in influence, which results in a further drop in membership and a vicious circle of decline.

As globalisation and de-industrialisation weaken the traditional sources of trade union membership, many trade unions, particularly in the new member states, are forced to re-think their strategy and remarket themselves to a generation for whom membership is not as automatic a decision as it was for their parents.

The decline in the membership of trade unions has been a feature of the European labour market for many years. A study of 23 member states by the European Industrial Relations Observatory found that membership fell by one-sixth in 1993-2003. According to the European Commission, trade union density - the measure of trade union membership as a percentage of the workforce - fell from 32.6% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2001, or by about 1% each year.

But general figures mask large differences between member states. For example, some of the smaller states, such as Luxembourg, Ireland, Malta

and Cyprus have actually experienced significant increases in trade union membership over the past decade. But these increases have been more than offset by sharp declines in the larger, more traditional centres of trade union power. Germany, in particular, has seen its trade union membership drop by almost 25% since 1993, while membership in the UK has fallen by 12%. But it is in the new member states that the decline has been most dramatic.

In Poland, whose Solidarity movement famously helped bring to an end the country's communist system, membership has fallen by over 70%. Even Solidarity itself, which this year celebrates the 25th anniversary of its founding in the Gdansk shipyard, has seen its numbers plummet by up to 60%. Trade union density rates in Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia fell from between 80%-90% in 1990 to 30% and lower by 2002.

A large proportion of the decline in membership in the new member states, particularly in the early stages, can be explained by the political hangover from the end of communism. Reacting to the compulsory affiliations of

the communist era, political participation rates have fallen across the spectrum, from political parties to trade unions. But in many cases, trade union density has fallen even beyond that of the old member states.

There is more to the decline of trade unions in the new member states than post-communist backlash. The real reason, according to many, is the failure of trade unions effectively to adapt to the demands of the new neo-liberal economic set-up.

As Dimitrina Dimitrova of the International Labour Organisation's Central and Eastern European Office points out, this is ironic because trade unions in these countries "made the strategic decision in the early 1990s to be among the forces supporting democratisation and the transition to a market economy. Their historic compromise was somewhat unavoidable, but trade unions came out of this period considerably weakened".

Trade unions have suffered because they have been unable to install themselves into the new institutional set-up as effectively as their counterparts in the old member states. According to Imre Palkovics, President of the Hungarian National Federation of Workers' Councils, social dialogue is merely consultative and virtually non-existent on major policy proposals: "Prior to a meeting, the government always sends materials too late for a proper analysis or for real, substantive comments. And this tendency has been independent of government cycles."

The presence of trade unions in enterprises is even weaker than in the national tripartite dialogue. A European Commission report on industrial relations published in January points out that "there is a general lack of institutionalisation and [works] councils are virtually non-existent in any of the new member states".

Much of this is the result of the youthful economic setting. Since the advent of the market economy after the fall of communism, much of the economic growth has been generated by large multinational companies and small-

and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which therefore have a disproportionate presence compared to their weight in the old member states. And, if there are two types of companies in which trade unions have been historically bad at recruiting members and establishing representation, they are large international companies and SMEs. Without representation on the ground, it is difficult to recruit new members. Without members, it is difficult to be taken seriously as a social partner. All of this has led to a fragmentation of the trade union 'market' with different unions often competing with each other for members.

Similar reasons explain the decline of union membership in the old member states. Fragmentation and an increase in service-sector employment have undermined the membership of the traditionally powerful unions, while changes in the labour market have led to an increasing participation of groups who are less likely to join unions. But in the old member states, high unemployment has also played its role. Those unions prepared to help their employees with unemployment insurance, as happens in Finland, Denmark and Sweden, have seen their membership hold steady.

But the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is showing the way forward for its weakened members. Amid

the widespread decline in membership, the ETUC's numbers have actually increased - from 36.1 million in 1973 to 46.3m in 1995 and 59m in 2003 - even if much of this growth is the result of ETUC's expansion to new countries.

Consolidation appears to be the new trend for trade unions across the EU with the emergence in the past seven years of 'super-unions' in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany and the UK. New mergers are on the horizon in Austria this year between white and blue-collar unions and in Ireland and Finland in 2006.

According to the Commission's report, "the scale and spread of the resulting conglomerate unions, which straddle the boundaries of sectors and occupational groups", is a new phenomenon in union history. For the time being the consolidation of the trade unions appears to be limited to the old member states. But given the dramatic decline in membership in the new member states it cannot be long before they follow suit. The problem is that when unions merge, union officials lose their jobs.

Article takes a look at the difficulties trade unions are facing across Europe in times of globalisation and de-industrialisation. Dwindling membership figures, not only in the former Communist new Member States, forces them to re-think their strategy and remarket themselves, author suggests.