Today, that figure has slumped to just 6.8 million. In his own keynote speech, Monks was forced to acknowledge that union membership was ageing and unrepresentative. Only one in five workers under 30 are union members, compared to two in five workers in their 40s. Unions are mainly located in the public sector and have little representation in service industries. So we must find new representatives who are respected, both by fellow workers and by managers, rather than individuals who are personally disaffected.
Unions are never strong when their representatives are drawn from the disaffected.
At the same time he is hostile to the basic concerns of those sections of workers still organised within the unions, who are far from happy with the constant erosion of their own living standards. Like their counterparts in Blair's New Labour, the TUC bureaucracy constitutes a narrow and extremely privileged social layer who have done very well for themselves during the past two decades of unbridled speculation and industrial downsizing. But that adversarial approach was part of the reason for Britain's industrial decline. The unofficial electricians' strike this week was not the first embarrassing rebuff delivered to Jackson. Less than 24 hours after his Tuesday speech, over 400 AEEU members at Ford's Dagenham and Enfield plants staged a 24-hour walkout over pay and working hours.