However, researchers predict that increases in overall employment in the mining and manufacturing sectors are a thing of the past. The growth industries of the future include services and telecommunications. The shape of things to come Already, new kinds of unions, and their relationship to a national centre, are being debated. The Cosatu of the future will almost certainly be a federation of larger unions, mainly through a series of ongoing mergers. We could possibly expect huge unions for manufacturing, the public sector, and for service workers.
Bigger unions are financially more viable.
A federation of a few large affiliates structured along these lines should make co-ordinating activities a lot easier. Also, because most workers change jobs within a sector, and seldom between sectors, they need not change unions. That makes for easier administration. But the compromises of accommodating many sectors in one union often increases the workload for everyone. And large organisations tend to become bureaucratic monoliths.