In countries like the UK unions have none of the institutional supports or incidental subsidies that arise from the finances and facilities associated with extensive forms of industrial democracy, information and consultation. Exacerbating these problems is the fact that unions are, in practice, pluralist organisations, comprising many different interest groups and responsible to a variety of stakeholders. The membership of most unions is heterogeneous, covering a wide range of salaries, functions and occupations. The interests of all the stakeholders will rarely be congruent and it is a function of effective management to reconcile or at least balance conflicting interests and competing priorities. Membership decline The widely existing situation of declining memberships and income are occurring at a time when the demands on union services are growing almost exponentially, with the replacement of national-level bargaining and giant workplaces by local bargaining and small work sites.
Careful management is needed if the unions are to survive and prosper.
Yet trade union leaders do not reach their positions, whether elected or appointed, on the basis of proven management skills. They may have risen through the union's ranks as experienced negotiators, as exceptional organisers, or owe their position to being head of the faction which currently enjoys hegemony within the union. Many European unions are highly unlikely to recruit personnel to strategic positions in the union on the basis of open recruitment and even less likely to appoint them solely on the basis of technical competence. Unions expect, and often explicitly state in a job advertisement that commitment to the labour movement is required. This may be justifiable but an unfortunate consequence is that unions tend to assume their personnel are self-motivating and do not require the incentives and rewards they routinely demand from employers on behalf of union members.